Combining Restorability and Error Detection Ability for Effective Trace Signal Selection
Bınod Kumar, Ankit Jindal, Masahiro Fujita, Virendra Pal Singh · 2017
Persistent growth in design complexity has led to increased chances of bugs appearing during post-silicon validation. Debugging errors at this stage requires some arrangement for expanding the observability of internal signals of the design. Limited number of trace buffers help in increasing visibility of these internal states. However, appropriate trace signal selection is very difficult. Restorability of untraced states with the help of traced ones is a popular approach for signal selection although it fails to address the main issue of error detection. We propose a signal selection methodology which combines the restoration capability and error detection ability of these signals. Experimental evaluation of the proposed signal selection approach on benchmark circuits indicates improved error detection for various kind of design errors. Practical consideration like minimizing routing overhead has also been analyzed.