Fast Measurement of the "Non-Deterministic Zone" in Microprocessor Debug Using Maximum Likelihood Estimation

Speed debug is a critical part of microprocessor diagnosis and debug. During this stage, the test engineer must determine and increase the maximum speed at which the processor can run reliably. One of the difficulties of this stage is that the pass-fail boundary, in practice, is not abrupt, but rather encompasses a non-deterministic region of behavior. Accurately modeling this non-deterministic region is particularly important since it directly influences the amount of time needed for speed debug. Current chip debug efforts often rely on the use of brute force techniques to deduce the shape of the pass-fail boundary region. More specifically, speed debug (i.e., the process of finding and fixing critical paths that prevent a chip from running at a higher frequency) requires a thorough understanding of the width and shape of the pass-fail boundary region where the chip´s behavior is non- deterministic. In this paper, we propose a statistical method based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) techniques to infer the underlying shape of the non-deterministic region. Our method was tested on pre-production Intel microprocessors and was successful in modeling the shape of the fuzz-region in substantially fewer iterations compared to a brute force approach.