Title
Enhancing Post-Silicon Processor Debug With Incremental Cache State Dumping
Abstract
During post-silicon validation/debug of processors, it is common to alternate between two phases: processor execution and state dump. The state dump, where the entire processor state is dumped off-chip to a logic analyzer for further processing, is a major bottleneck. We present a technique for improving debug efficiency by reducing the volume of cache data dumped off-chip, while still capturing the complete state. The reduction is achieved by introducing hardware mechanisms to transmit only the portion of the cache that was updated since the last dump. We propose two design alternatives based on whether or not the processor is permitted to continue execution during the dump: Blocking Incremental Cache Dumping (BICD) and Non-blocking Incremental Cache Dumping (NICD). We observe a 64% reduction in overall cache lines dumped and the dump time reduces to an average of 16.8% and 0.0002% for BICD and NICD respectively.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1109/VLSISOC.2010.5642623
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2010 18TH IEEE/IFIP INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON VLSI AND SYSTEM-ON-CHIP
Keywords
Field
DocType
engines,very large scale integration,hidden markov models,registers,chip,system on a chip,benchmark testing,data compression
Pipeline burst cache,Cache invalidation,Cache pollution,Cache,Computer science,Page cache,Cache algorithms,Cache coloring,Smart Cache,Operating system,Embedded system
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.35
15
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Preeti Ranjan Panda178689.40
Anant Vishnoi270.80
M. Balakrishnan351872.63