Bottom-Up Generation of Verilog Designs for Testing EDA Tools

Abstract: Testing Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools rely on benchmarks -- designs written in Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) such as Verilog, SystemVerilog, or VHDL. Although collections of benchmarks for these languages exist, they are typically limited in size. This scarcity has recently drawn more attention due to the increasing need for training LLMs in this domain. To deal with such limitation, this paper presents a methodology and a corresponding tool for generating realistic Verilog designs. The tool, ChiGen, was originally developed to test the Jasper\textregistered\ Formal Verification Platform, a product by Cadence Design Systems. Now, released as open-source software, ChiGen has been able to identify zero-day bugs in a range of tools, including Verible, Verilator, and Yosys. This paper outlines the principles behind ChiGen's design, focusing on three aspects of it: (i) generation guided by probabilistic grammars, (ii) type inference via the Hindley-Milner algorithm, and (iii) code injection enabled by data-flow analysis. Once deployed on standard hardware, ChiGen outperforms existing Verilog Fuzzers such as Verismith, TransFuzz, and VlogHammer regarding structural diversity, code coverage, and bug-finding ability.