Fault Diagnosis using Quantified Boolean Formulas

Automatic debugging of sequential circuits has been considered a practically intractable task due to the excessive memory and run-time requirements associated with tackling industrial-size problems. This paper proposes a novel Quantified Boolean Formula (QBF) based approach for fault diagnosis in sequential circuits. A performance-driven succinct QBF encoding of the problem, coupled with the tremendous present-day advances in QBF solvers make this strategy a successful one. Extensive experiments on industrial circuits confirm the memory advantage and demonstrate the outstanding performance of the proposed framework.