Post-Silicon Validation and Debug


Book Description

This book provides a comprehensive coverage of System-on-Chip (SoC) post-silicon validation and debug challenges and state-of-the-art solutions with contributions from SoC designers, academic researchers as well as SoC verification experts. The readers will get a clear understanding of the existing debug infrastructure and how they can be effectively utilized to verify and debug SoCs.




System-on-Chip Test Architectures


Book Description

Modern electronics testing has a legacy of more than 40 years. The introduction of new technologies, especially nanometer technologies with 90nm or smaller geometry, has allowed the semiconductor industry to keep pace with the increased performance-capacity demands from consumers. As a result, semiconductor test costs have been growing steadily and typically amount to 40% of today's overall product cost. This book is a comprehensive guide to new VLSI Testing and Design-for-Testability techniques that will allow students, researchers, DFT practitioners, and VLSI designers to master quickly System-on-Chip Test architectures, for test debug and diagnosis of digital, memory, and analog/mixed-signal designs. - Emphasizes VLSI Test principles and Design for Testability architectures, with numerous illustrations/examples. - Most up-to-date coverage available, including Fault Tolerance, Low-Power Testing, Defect and Error Tolerance, Network-on-Chip (NOC) Testing, Software-Based Self-Testing, FPGA Testing, MEMS Testing, and System-In-Package (SIP) Testing, which are not yet available in any testing book. - Covers the entire spectrum of VLSI testing and DFT architectures, from digital and analog, to memory circuits, and fault diagnosis and self-repair from digital to memory circuits. - Discusses future nanotechnology test trends and challenges facing the nanometer design era; promising nanotechnology test techniques, including Quantum-Dots, Cellular Automata, Carbon-Nanotubes, and Hybrid Semiconductor/Nanowire/Molecular Computing. - Practical problems at the end of each chapter for students.




Debugging Systems-on-Chip


Book Description

This book describes an approach and supporting infrastructure to facilitate debugging the silicon implementation of a System-on-Chip (SOC), allowing its associated product to be introduced into the market more quickly. Readers learn step-by-step the key requirements for debugging a modern, silicon SOC implementation, nine factors that complicate this debugging task, and a new debug approach that addresses these requirements and complicating factors. The authors’ novel communication-centric, scan-based, abstraction-based, run/stop-based (CSAR) debug approach is discussed in detail, showing how it helps to meet debug requirements and address the nine, previously identified factors that complicate debugging silicon implementations of SOCs. The authors also derive the debug infrastructure requirements to support debugging of a silicon implementation of an SOC with their CSAR debug approach. This debug infrastructure consists of a generic on-chip debug architecture, a configurable automated design-for-debug flow to be used during the design of an SOC, and customizable off-chip debugger software. Coverage includes an evaluation of the efficiency and effectiveness of the CSAR approach and its supporting infrastructure, using six industrial SOCs and an illustrative, example SOC model. The authors also quantify the hardware cost and design effort to support their approach.




Transforming Reconfigurable Systems: A Festschrift Celebrating The 60th Birthday Of Professor Peter Cheung


Book Description

Over the last three decades, Professor Peter Cheung has made significant contributions to a variety of areas, such as analogue and digital computer-aided design tools, high-level synthesis and hardware/software codesign, low-power and high-performance circuit architectures for signal and image processing, and mixed-signal integrated-circuit design.However, the area that has attracted his greatest attention is reconfigurable systems and their design, and his work has contributed to the transformation of this important and exciting discipline. This festschrift contains a unique collection of technical papers based on presentations at a workshop at Imperial College London in May 2013 celebrating Professor Cheung's 60th birthday. Renowned researchers who have been inspired and motivated by his outstanding research in the area of reconfigurable systems are brought together from across the globe to offer their latest research in reconfigurable systems. Professor Cheung has devoted much of his professional career to Imperial College London, and has served with distinction as the Head of Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering for several years. His outstanding capability and his loyalty to Imperial College and the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering are legendary. Professor Cheung has made tremendous strides in ensuring excellence in both research and teaching, and in establishing sound governance and strong financial endowment; but above all, he has made his department a wonderful place in which to work and study.




Trace-Based Post-Silicon Validation for VLSI Circuits


Book Description

This book first provides a comprehensive coverage of state-of-the-art validation solutions based on real-time signal tracing to guarantee the correctness of VLSI circuits. The authors discuss several key challenges in post-silicon validation and provide automated solutions that are systematic and cost-effective. A series of automatic tracing solutions and innovative design for debug (DfD) techniques are described, including techniques for trace signal selection for enhancing visibility of functional errors, a multiplexed signal tracing strategy for improving functional error detection, a tracing solution for debugging electrical errors, an interconnection fabric for increasing data bandwidth and supporting multi-core debug, an interconnection fabric design and optimization technique to increase transfer flexibility and a DfD design and associated tracing solution for improving debug efficiency and expanding tracing window. The solutions presented in this book improve the validation quality of VLSI circuits, and ultimately enable the design and fabrication of reliable electronic devices.




Debug Automation from Pre-Silicon to Post-Silicon


Book Description

This book describes automated debugging approaches for the bugs and the faults which appear in different abstraction levels of a hardware system. The authors employ a transaction-based debug approach to systems at the transaction-level, asserting the correct relation of transactions. The automated debug approach for design bugs finds the potential fault candidates at RTL and gate-level of a circuit. Debug techniques for logic bugs and synchronization bugs are demonstrated, enabling readers to localize the most difficult bugs. Debug automation for electrical faults (delay faults)finds the potentially failing speedpaths in a circuit at gate-level. The various debug approaches described achieve high diagnosis accuracy and reduce the debugging time, shortening the IC development cycle and increasing the productivity of designers. Describes a unified framework for debug automation used at both pre-silicon and post-silicon stages; Provides approaches for debug automation of a hardware system at different levels of abstraction, i.e., chip, gate-level, RTL and transaction level; Includes techniques for debug automation of design bugs and electrical faults, as well as an infrastructure to debug NoC-based multiprocessor SoCs.




Post-Silicon and Runtime Verification for Modern Processors


Book Description

The purpose of this book is to survey the state of the art and evolving directions in post-silicon and runtime verification. The authors start by giving an overview of the state of the art in verification, particularly current post-silicon methodologies in use in the industry, both for the domain of processor pipeline design and for memory subsystems. They then dive into the presentation of several new post-silicon verification solutions aimed at boosting the verification coverage of modern processors, dedicating several chapters to this topic. The presentation of runtime verification solutions follows a similar approach. This is an area of processor design that is still in its early stages of exploration and that holds the promise of accomplishing the ultimate goal of achieving complete correctness guarantees for microprocessor-based computation. The authors conclude the book with a look towards the future of late-stage verification and its growing role in the processor life-cycle.




Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems, FORMATS 2017, held in Berlin, Germany, in September 2017.​ The aim of FORMATS is to promote the study of fundamental and practical aspects of timed systems, and to bring together researchers from different disciplines that share interests in modelling and analysis of timed systems and, as a generalization, hybrid systems.




Security Policy in System-on-Chip Designs


Book Description

This book offers readers comprehensive coverage of security policy specification using new policy languages, implementation of security policies in Systems-on-Chip (SoC) designs – current industrial practice, as well as emerging approaches to architecting SoC security policies and security policy verification. The authors focus on a promising security architecture for implementing security policies, which satisfies the goals of flexibility, verification, and upgradability from the ground up, including a plug-and-play hardware block in which all policy implementations are enclosed. Using this architecture, they discuss the ramifications of designing SoC security policies, including effects on non-functional properties (power/performance), debug, validation, and upgrade. The authors also describe a systematic approach for “hardware patching”, i.e., upgrading hardware implementations of security requirements safely, reliably, and securely in the field, meeting a critical need for diverse Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Provides comprehensive coverage of SoC security requirements, security policies, languages, and security architecture for current and emerging computing devices; Explodes myths and ambiguities in SoC security policy implementations, and provide a rigorous treatment of the subject; Demonstrates a rigorous, step-by-step approach to developing a diversity of SoC security policies; Introduces a rigorous, disciplined approach to “hardware patching”, i.e., secure technique for updating hardware functionality of computing devices in-field; Includes discussion of current and emerging approaches for security policy verification.




ESL Design and Verification


Book Description

Visit the authors' companion site! http://www.electronicsystemlevel.com/ - Includes interactive forum with the authors!Electronic System Level (ESL) design has mainstreamed – it is now an established approach at most of the world's leading system-on-chip (SoC) design companies and is being used increasingly in system design. From its genesis as an algorithm modeling methodology with 'no links to implementation', ESL is evolving into a set of complementary methodologies that enable embedded system design, verification and debug through to the hardware and software implementation of custom SoC, system-on-FPGA, system-on-board, and entire multi-board systems. This book arises from experience the authors have gained from years of work as industry practitioners in the Electronic System Level design area; they have seen "SLD" or "ESL" go through many stages and false starts, and have observed that the shift in design methodologies to ESL is finally occurring. This is partly because of ESL technologies themselves are stabilizing on a useful set of languages being standardized (SystemC is the most notable), and use models are being identified that are beginning to get real adoption. ESL DESIGN & VERIFICATION offers a true prescriptive guide to ESL that reviews its past and outlines the best practices of today.Table of ContentsCHAPTER 1: WHAT IS ESL? CHAPTER 2: TAXONOMY AND DEFINITIONS FOR THE ELECTRONIC SYSTEM LEVEL CHAPTER 3: EVOLUTION OF ESL DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 4: WHAT ARE THE ENABLERS OF ESL? CHAPTER 5: ESL FLOW CHAPTER 6: SPECIFICATIONS AND MODELING CHAPTER 7: PRE-PARTITIONING ANALYSIS CHAPTER 8: PARTITIONING CHAPTER 9: POST-PARTITIONING ANALYSIS AND DEBUG CHAPTER 10: POST-PARTITIONING VERIFICATION CHAPTER 11: HARDWARE IMPLEMENTATION CHAPTER 12: SOFTWARE IMPLEMENTATION CHAPTER 13: USE OF ESL FOR IMPLEMENTATION VERIFICATION CHAPTER 14: RESEARCH, EMERGING AND FUTURE PROSPECTS APPENDIX: LIST OF ACRONYMS* Provides broad, comprehensive coverage not available in any other such book * Massive global appeal with an internationally recognised author team * Crammed full of state of the art content from notable industry experts