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Despite the strong capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in generating, completing, and debugging software code, their utilization in the specialized field of HDL debugging has been limited and, to date, has not yielded satisfactory results. In this paper, we propose an LLM-assisted HDL debugging framework, namely HDLdebugger, which consists of HDL debugging data generation via a reverse engineering approach, a search engine for retrieval-augmented generation, and a retrieval-augmented LLM fine-tuning approach. Through the integration of these components, HDLdebugger can automate and streamline HDL debugging for chip design. Our comprehensive experiments, conducted on an HDL code dataset sourced from Industry, reveal that HDLdebugger outperforms 13 cutting-edge LLM baselines, displaying exceptional effectiveness in HDL code debugging.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3735638","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,5,15]],"date-time":"2025-05-15T07:08:57Z","timestamp":1747292937000},"page":"1-26","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":32,"title":["HDLdebugger: Streamlining HDL debugging with Large Language Models"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"30","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7994-6290","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Xufeng","family":"Yao","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Computer Science and Engineering, CUHK","place":["Hong Kong, Hong Kong"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3152-5929","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Haoyang","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Huawei Technologies Co Ltd","place":["HongKong, Hong Kong"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3218-8071","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Tsz Ho","family":"Chan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Huawei Technologies Co Ltd","place":["HongKong, Hong Kong"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-4218-3904","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Wenyi","family":"Xiao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Huawei Technologies Co Ltd","place":["HongKong, Hong Kong"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2236-8784","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Mingxuan","family":"Yuan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Huawei Technologies Co Ltd","place":["HongKong, Hong Kong"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6811-0466","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yu","family":"Huang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Huawei Technologies Co Ltd","place":["Shenzhen, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8257-5806","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lei","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"HKUST","place":["Hong Kong, Hong Kong"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6406-4810","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Bei","family":"Yu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"CUHK","place":["Hong Kong, Hong Kong"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,21]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_1_2_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/LICS.1995.523251"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_3_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/TCAD.2011.2110592"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_4_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2684746.2689060"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_5_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3213846.3213871"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_6_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3293882.3330577"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_7_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3105906"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_8_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.48550\/ARXIV.2303.18184"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_9_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.48550\/ARXIV.2303.08774"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_10_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.48550\/ARXIV.2311.16543"},{"issue":"3","key":"e_1_3_1_11_2","first-page":"46:1\u201346:31","article-title":"Verigen: A large language model for verilog code generation","volume":"29","author":"Thakur Shailja","year":"2024","unstructured":"Shailja Thakur, Baleegh Ahmad, Hammond Pearce, Benjamin Tan, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Ramesh Karri, and Siddharth Garg. 2024. 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