Enhancing Observability for Post-Silicon Debug with On-chip Communication Monitors
Yuting Cao, Hernan Palombo, Sandip Kumar Ray, Hao Zheng · 2018
Reconstructing system-level behavior from silicon traces is critical in post-silicon debug of System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. However, limited observability makes the reconstruction process complex and inaccurate, thus offering little help for SoC debug. This paper presents an on-chip monitoring infrastructure aiming to enhance observability by detecting communication transactions from low level signal events. The detected transactions are output on-the-fly for off-chip system-level behavior reconstruction. Experiments show that the proposed monitoring infrastructure enables accurate observations on communication transactions over long periods of time, thus leading to accurate reconstruction of system level behavior, with low area overhead.