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doi: 10.7873/DATE.2015.1012
Quick Error Detection Tests with Fast Runtimes for Effective Post-Silicon Validation and Debug
David Lin1, Eswaran S.3, Sharad Kumar3, Eric Rentschler4 and Subhasish Mitra1,2
1Department of EE, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
2Department of CS, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
3Freescale Semiconductor, Noida, India
4Mentor Graphics, Longmont, CO, USA
ABSTRACT
Long error detection latency, the time elapsed from the occurrence
of an error caused by a bug to its manifestation as an observable
failure, severely limits the effectiveness of existing post-silicon
validation and debug techniques. Traditional post-silicon validation
tests can incur very long error detection latencies of millions or even
billions of clock cycles. An earlier technique called Quick Error
Detection (QED) shortens error detection latencies to only few hundred
(or thousand) clock cycles. However, software-only QED (i.e., QED
implemented entirely in software) can result in significantly increased
post-silicon validation test runtimes. We present a new technique
called Fast QED that overcomes this drawback of software-only QED,
while preserving the error detection latency and bug coverage benefits
of software-only QED. Simulation results using an OpenSPARC T2-
like multi-core SoC and bugs abstracted from multiple commercial
multi-core SoCs demonstrate: 1. Fast QED achieves 4 orders of
magnitude improvement in test runtime as compared to software-only
QED, with only 0.4% increase in chip area; 2. Fast QED improves
error detection latencies by up to 5 orders of magnitude compared to
non-QED tests, and also achieves improved error detection latencies
compared to software-only QED; and, 3. Fast QED improves bug
coverage by up to 2-fold compared to non-QED tests (similar to
software-only QED).
Keywords: Debug, Post-silicon validation, Quick error detection.
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