RTL-Repair: Fast Symbolic Repair of Hardware Design Code

We present RTL-Repair, a semantics-based repair tool for register transfer level circuit descriptions. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art tool, RTL-Repair generates more correct repairs within seconds instead of minutes or even hours. We imagine that RTL-Repair could thus be integrated into an IDE to give developers repair suggestions promptly. Our new SMT-based one-step fault localization and repair algorithm for digital hardware designs uses optimization to generate minimal changes that a user can easily understand. A novel adaptive windowing approach allows us to avoid scalability issues by focusing the repair search on the parts of the test that matter the most. RTL-Repair provides repairs that pass their testbench for 9 out of 12 real bugs collected from open-source hardware projects. Two repairs fully match the ground truth, one partially, four more repairs change the correct expression but in a way that overfits the testbench, and only three repairs differ strongly from the ground truth.