Post Silicon Validation And Debug

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.

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.

This book describes a wide variety of System-on-Chip (SoC) security threats and vulnerabilities, as well as their sources, in each stage of a design life cycle. The authors discuss a wide variety of state-of-the-art security verification and validation approaches such as formal methods and side-channel analysis, as well as simulation-based security and trust validation approaches. This book provides a comprehensive reference for system on chip designers and verification and validation engineers interested in verifying security and trust of heterogeneous SoCs.

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.

This book is about security in embedded systems and it provides an authoritative reference to all aspects of security in system-on-chip (SoC) designs. The authors discuss issues ranging from security requirements in SoC designs, definition of architectures and design choices to enforce and validate security policies, and trade-offs and conflicts involving security, functionality, and debug requirements. Coverage also includes case studies from the “trenches” of current industrial practice in design, implementation, and validation of security-critical embedded systems. Provides an authoritative reference and summary of the current state-of-the-art in security for embedded systems, hardware IPs and SoC designs; Takes a "cross-cutting" view of security that interacts with different design and validation components such as architecture, implementation, verification, and debug, each enforcing unique trade-offs; Includes high-level overview, detailed analysis on implementation, and relevant case studies on design/verification/debug issues related to IP/SoC security.

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.

A textbook on the fundamentals of VLSI design flow, covering the various stages of design implementation, verification, and testing.

The two-volume set LNCS 10426 and LNCS 10427 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2017, held in Heidelberg, Germany, in July 2017. The total of 50 full and 7 short papers presented together with 5 keynotes and tutorials in the proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 191 submissions. The CAV conference series is dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practice of computer-aided formal analysis of hardware and software systems. The conference covers the spectrum from theoretical results to concrete applications, with an emphasis on practical verification tools and the algorithms and techniques that are needed for their implementation.