Automated trace signals selection using the RTL descriptions

Pre-silicon verification has been traditionally used for eliminating design bugs before tape-out. However, due to the increasing design complexity and the limited accuracy in circuit modelling, the number of the design errors that escape to silicon continues to grow. This is aggravated by the interactions between multiple clock and power domains in the modern system-on-a-chip devices. As a result, structured methods for post-silicon debugging, which aim to detect and localize the bug escapes in silicon, have gained increasing attention in recent years. However, the existing approaches to aid post-silicon debugging primarily rely on the analysis performed using gate-level circuit descriptions. Since design entry is commonly done at the register transfer-level (RTL), the RTL information can be leveraged for the design of the on-chip debug hardware. In particular, in this paper we investigate how to automatically decide which signals to trace in real-time using the RTL information.

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