An Automated Testing and Debugging Toolkit for Gate-Level Logic Synthesis Applications

Abstract

Correctness and robustness are essential for logic synthesis applications, but they are often only tested with a limited set of benchmarks. Moreover, when the application fails on a large benchmark, the debugging process may be tedious and time-consuming. In some fields such as compiler construction, automatic testing and debugging tools are well-developed to support developers and provide minimal guarantees on program quality. In this paper, we adapt fuzz testing and delta debugging techniques and specialize them for gate-level netlists commonly used in logic synthesis. Our toolkit improves over similar tools specialized for the AIGER format by supporting other gate-level netlist formats and by allowing a tight integration to provide 10x speed-up. Experimental results show that our fuzzer captures defects in mockturtle, ABC, and LSOracle with 10x smaller testcases and our testcase minimizer extracts minimal failure-inducing cores using 2x fewer oracle calls.