Automatic Debug Quantification for Workload Balance and Progress Tracking

Microprocessor verification involves running a large scale of simulations that can help identify potential fails. Debugging these fails to their root cause is essential to find RTL bugs and the debug rate indicates the progress we make towards that goal. Accurate calculation of the debug rate presents a challenge in test benches that do not exhibit a one-to-one relationship between signatures and bugs. In this paper, we present a methodology to analyze debug effort and programmatically compute the debug rate in such scenarios to facilitate total quantification, workload balancing, and progress tracking of debug effort.