Model-Based Diagnosis of Hardware Description Languages

This paper discusses the use of fault models for the diagnosis of hardware designs written in the VHDL hardware description language. VHDL designs are concurrent programs consisting of hundreds of thousands of lines of source code, whose testing and debugging is a very time-consuming process. Building on an abstract representation that allows the search for errors in even the largest VHDL programs, but with strictly limited accuracy , this paper presents a more detailed approach which is currently under study for local use in situations where focusing on a small part of the program may be possible. The approach is based on assigning fault modes to VHDL statements, with the main diierence to the standard hardware diagnosis approach being that fault modes are directly expressed in terms of repair operations that will presumably improve the correctness of the program. We provide a running example and discuss the implications of the representation.