Shift-Left High-Level Synthesis Verification via Knowledge-Augmented LLM Agent

Abstract: High-Level Synthesis (HLS) enables rapid hardware development by translating C/C++ programs into hardware implementations. Functional consistency verification between golden C specifications and HLS-oriented C implementations is a critical yet labor-intensive task in HLS design flows. While LLMs have recently shown promise in automated testbench generation, their stochastic nature often leads to insufficient coverage, inconsistent verification environments, and unreliable equivalence checking results. To address these limitations, we propose a knowledge-augmented, agent-driven shift-left verification framework for automated functional consistency checking between golden C and HLS-C implementations before synthesis. The framework introduces a Dual-Tier Consistency Checking mechanism that jointly enforces static structural alignment and dynamic behavioral equivalence between paired testbenches, while integrating symbolic execution and coverage-driven refinement to improve verification completeness. Furthermore, we construct a heterogeneous HLS Verification Knowledge Graph to provide topology-aware reasoning priors for testbench generation, and design an autonomous verification agent to orchestrate iterative refinement and failure diagnosis across heterogeneous toolchains. Experimental results on 107 HLS benchmark pairs demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves 98.26\% average coverage and 95.33\% dynamic consistency, outperforming representative AST-based, retrieval-augmented, and iterative agent-based baselines. https://github.com/cz-5f/HLS-LeVeri.git