Bridging the Gap between Hardware Fuzzing and Industrial Verification

TL;DR

This paper reviews hardware fuzzing's current state, identifies compatibility issues with industrial verification, and proposes a prototype to significantly improve its efficiency in industrial environments.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive assessment of hardware fuzzing's industrial applicability and introduces HwFuzzEnv, a prototype that accelerates hardware fuzzing in industrial verification.

Findings

Hardware fuzzing can be significantly accelerated with proper industrial support.

The prototype HwFuzzEnv achieves hundreds of times speedup in industrial settings.

Current verification tools have bottlenecks that hinder hardware fuzzing performance.

Abstract

As hardware design complexity increases, hardware fuzzing emerges as a promising tool for automating the verification process. However, a significant gap still exists before it can be applied in industry. This paper aims to summarize the current progress of hardware fuzzing from an industry-use perspective and propose solutions to bridge the gap between hardware fuzzing and industrial verification. First, we review recent hardware fuzzing methods and analyze their compatibilities with industrial verification. We establish criteria to assess whether a hardware fuzzing approach is compatible. Second, we examine whether current verification tools can efficiently support hardware fuzzing. We identify the bottlenecks in hardware fuzzing performance caused by insufficient support from the industrial environment. To overcome the bottlenecks, we propose a prototype, HwFuzzEnv, providing the necessary support for hardware fuzzing. With this prototype, the previous hardware fuzzing method can achieve a several hundred times speedup in industrial settings. Our work could serve as a reference for EDA companies, encouraging them to enhance their tools to support hardware fuzzing efficiently in industrial verification.