Automated Trace Signals Identification and State Restoration for Improving Observability in Post-Silicon Validation

Embedded logic analysis has emerged as a powerful technique for identifying functional bugs during post-silicon validation, as it enables at-speed acquisition of data from the circuit nodes in real-time. Nonetheless, the amount of data that is observed is limited by the capacity of the on-chip trace buffers. This paper introduces an automated method for improving the utilization of the on-chip storage, by identifying a small set of trace signals from which a large number of states can be restored using a compute-efficient algorithm. This enlarged set of data can then be used to aid the search of functional bugs in the fabricated circuit.