Post-silicon validation and debug have gained importance in recent years to track down errors that have escaped the pre-silicon phase. Limited observability of internal signals during post-silicon debug necessitates t...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781612846552
Post-silicon validation and debug have gained importance in recent years to track down errors that have escaped the pre-silicon phase. Limited observability of internal signals during post-silicon debug necessitates the storage of signal states in real time. trace buffers are used to store these states. To increase the debug observation window, it is essential to compress these trace signals, so that tracedata over larger number of cycles can be stored in the trace buffer while keeping its size constant. In this paper, we propose several dictionary based compression techniques for trace data compression that takes account of the fact that the difference between golden and erroneous tracedata is small. Therefore, the static dictionary selected based on golden tracedata can provide notably better compression performance than the dynamic dictionaries selected in the current approaches. This will also significantly reduce the hardware overhead by reducing the dictionary size. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach can provide up to 60% better compression compared to existing approaches, while reducing the architecture overhead by 84%.
The effectiveness of at-speed silicon debug is constrained by the limited trace buffer size and/or trace port bandwidth, requiring highly-efficient trace data compression solutions. As it is usually inevitable to have...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450311991
The effectiveness of at-speed silicon debug is constrained by the limited trace buffer size and/or trace port bandwidth, requiring highly-efficient trace data compression solutions. As it is usually inevitable to have unknown 'X' values during silicon debug, trace compressor should be equipped with X-tolerance feature in order not to significantly degrade error detection capability. To tackle this problem, this paper presents a novel reconfigurable X-tolerant trace compressor, namely X-tracer, which is able to tolerate as many X-bits as possible in the trace streams while guaranteeing high compression ratio, at the cost of little extra design-for-debug hardware. Experimental results on benchmark circuits demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.
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