Reusing Trace Buffers to Enhance Cache Performance
Neetu Jindala, Preeti Ranjan Pandab and Smruti R. Sarangic
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India.
aneetu@cse.iitd.ac.in
bpanda@cse.iitd.ac.in
csrsarangi@cse.iitd.ac.in
ABSTRACT
With the increasing complexity of modern Systems-on-Chip, the possibility of functional errors escaping design verification is growing. Post-silicon validation targets the discovery of these errors in early hardware prototypes. Due to limited visibility and observability, dedicated design-for-debug (DFD) hardware such as trace buffers are inserted to aid postsilicon validation. In spite of its benefit, such hardware incurs area overheads, which impose size limitations. However, the overhead could be overcome if the area dedicated to DFD could be reused in-field. In this work, we present a novel method for reusing an existing trace buffer as a victim cache of a processor to enhance performance. The trace buffer storage space is reused for the victim cache, with a small additional controller logic. Experimental results on several benchmarks and trace buffer sizes show that the proposed approach can enhance the average performance by up to 8.3% over a baseline architecture. We also propose a strategy for dynamic power management of the structure, to enable saving energy with negligible impact on performance.
