Functional debugging of systems-on-chip
Darko Kirovski, Miodrag Potkonjak, Lisa M. Guerra · 1998
MS~CTDue totheexponentird growth of both design complexity and the number of gates per pin, functional debugging has emerged as a critical step in the development of a system-on-chip.We introduce a novel debugging approach for programmable systems-on-chip.The new method leverages the advantagw of the two complementary functional execution approaches, emdation and simdation.We have developed a set of tools, transparent to both the design and debug~ng process, which enabl= the user to run long test sequences in emdation, and upon error detection, roll-back to an arbitrary instance in execution time, and switch over to simtiationbased debugging for fu~design visibility md contro~abifity.The efficacy of the approach is dependent on the method for transferring the computation from one execution domain to another.To enable effective transfer of the computation state, we have identifid a set of optimization tasks, established their computation complexity, and developed an efficient suite of optimization dgoritbms.