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An effective fault localization approach for Verilog based on enhanced contexts

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Conclusion

The HDL research community recognizes the pivotal role of bug localization in the debugging workflow, offering substantial relief to developers. This paper introduces ContextHD, a robust bug localization method tailored for Verilog, leveraging enhanced contexts. ContextHD integrates static slicing techniques with advanced suspiciousness measurement methods to generate a prioritized list of statements based on their suspicious values, arranged in descending order. Our experimental evaluation involved comparing ContextHD with seven established state-of-the-art bug localization techniques. The results unequivocally demonstrate that ContextHD outperforms these methods significantly. Future endeavors include refining ContextHD to further enhance its accuracy.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the Guangdong Province Ordinary University Characteristic Innovation Project (2023KTSCX193).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Xi’an University of Technology, Xi’an, 710048, China

    Zhuo Zhang

  2. Ningbo Artificial Intelligence Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Ningbo, 315000, China

    Ya Li

  3. No.83 Army Joint and Truma Disease Treatment Centre of PLA, Xinxiang, 453000, China

    Lei Xia

  4. Department of Software Engineering, Shanghai Second Polytechnic University, Shanghai, 201209, China

    Jianxin Xue

  5. College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Jiang Wu & Xiaoguang Mao

Authors
  1. Zhuo Zhang
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  2. Ya Li
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  3. Lei Xia
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lei Xia.

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Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests or financial conflicts to disclose.

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Zhang, Z., Li, Y., Xia, L. et al. An effective fault localization approach for Verilog based on enhanced contexts. Front. Comput. Sci. 18, 185108 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-024-2622-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-024-2622-6