Source-level Debugging and Beyond

Speaker: Keyi Zhang, PhD Student, Stanford University
Date: February 4, 2021

Debugging RTL is always challenging; debugging generated RTL is even more challenging, due to the additional layer of abstraction and optimization. In this talk we will first examine the status quo of hardware generators and reflect on what we learned from the prototype we've been developing for the past year. Then we will present a new version of the debugging framework that is orders of magnitude more efficient and compiler friendly. We will demonstrate a working prototype with popular generator frameworks such as Chisel and Magma. At the end of the talk, we will discuss how we can extend the debugging framework to other challenging domains, such as physical design, for rapid development.