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

Abstract

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) relies on transforming original C specifications into synthesizable HLS-oriented C (HLS-C) implementations. Functional consistency verification between original C specifications and HLS-C implementations is a critical yet labor-intensive task in HLS design flows. While Large Language Models (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 original 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 0.9826 average coverage and 0.9533 dynamic consistency, outperforming representative AST-based, retrieval-augmented, and iterative agent-based baselines. https://github.com/cz-5f/HLS-LeVeri.git