Dictionary-Guided Mutation Operators for Automated HDL Repair

Abstract

Automated repair of Hardware Description Language (HDL) designs remains challenging due to the large search space of candidate repairs and the strict syntactic and semantic constraints imposed by HDL grammars. Generic mutation strategies overwhelmingly generate syntactically invalid candidates that waste compilation and simulation budget, while synthesis-driven and template-based approaches impose their own constraints on generality and portability. In this paper, we propose a dictionary-guided HDL repair system that combines ANTLR-derived DUT-specific mutation vocabularies with a simulation-divergence fault localization (FL) module. The mutation operator applies category-constrained token substitutions, insertions, and deletions directly to Verilog source via regex-based matching, without requiring AST manipulation or synthesis. The FL module identifies diverging output wires from a single simulation run and scores source lines by structural proximity to those signals, directing the mutation search toward high-suspicion regions. A deterministic targeted sweep exhausts all dictionary mutations on the highest-scored lines before falling back to a genetic programming (GP) search. Evaluated on the CirFix benchmark suite across six design under test (DUT) families, the proposed approach produces correct oracle-passing repairs on 14 bug variants, including a 6-edit multi-bug instance that CirFix cannot repair, and achieves an 18x speedup over CirFix on a two-edit benchmark variant. These results indicate that dictionary-constrained mutation operators, combined with lightweight simulation-divergence FL, are a practical and competitive approach to automated HDL repair for common bug classes without formal analysis or synthesis dependencies.