Utilizing high level design information to speed up post-silicon debugging

Abstract

Due to the highly complicated control structures of modern processors as well as ASICs, some of the logical bugs may easily escape from the pre-silicon verification processes and remain into the silicon. Those bugs can only be found after the chip has been fabricated and used in the systems. So post-silicon debugging is becoming a essential part of the design flows for complicated and large system designs. This paper summarizes our research activities targeting post-silicon debugging for highly complicated pipeline processors as well as large ASICs. We have been working on the following three topics: 1) Translation of chip level error traces to high and abstracted level so that more efficient simulation as well as formal analysis become possible, 2) Utilize experiences on formal verification and debugging processes for pipelined processors for debugging and in-fields rectification of chips, and 3) Apply incremental high level synthesis for efficient in-fields rectifications of ASIC designs. Our approaches utilize high level or abstracted design information as much as possible to make things more efficient and effective. In this paper we briefly present the techniques for the first two topics.