High quality functional coverage based trace signal selection for post-silicon validation

Ma, Sai

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/73097 Copy

Description

Title

High quality functional coverage based trace signal selection for post-silicon validation

Author(s)

Ma, Sai

Issue Date

2015-01-21

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Vasudevan, Shobha

Department of Study

Electrical & Computer Eng

Discipline

Electrical & Computer Engr

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.S.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• Post-silicon validation
• Signal tracing
• PageRank

Abstract

Due to the drastic growth of design complexity and also shrinkage of the time-to-market window, it is always impossible to capture all bugs during the pre-silicon verification phase; therefore, a small number of bugs escape after a chip is manufactured. Once a chip is manufactured, it is considered as a black box since internal observability is lost. To increase observability for post-silicon validation, an effective silicon debug technique is to use an on-chip trace buffer to monitor and capture the circuit response of certain selected signals during its post-silicon operation. Since this aforementioned debugging trace buffer introduces area overhead, the amount of signals selected to be stored on this trace buffer is very limited. Therefore, a major challenge in this field is to select a powerful subset of internal signals to reconstruct the majority of the remaining signal values. Existing methods use a greedy selection process to converge to a locally optimal selection; this kind of method suffers from severe diminishing restoration ratio effect as more trace signals are selected. In addition, all of the previous publications have been focused on increasing restorability; none of them has ever been able to interpret the trace signals as high level meaningful debugging information. In this thesis, we formulate the trace signal selection problem into a data-mining problem and propose two approaches using PageRank and HITS algorithm. Our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm can effectively alleviate the diminishing restoration ratio effect. Furthermore, we propose a new metric to evaluate the quality of selected trace signals instead of restorability, which is the number of functionalities they cover when debugging; this is an angle previous publications have not addressed. According to our experimental results, the two new algorithms proposed in this thesis select better and more meaningful trace signals in terms of debugging.

Graduation Semester

2014-12

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/73097

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2014 Sai Ma

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