Reducing Post-Silicon Coverage Monitoring Overhead with Emulation and Bayesian Feature Selection
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With increasing design complexity, post-silicon validation has become a critical problem. In pre-silicon validation, coverage is the primary metric of validation effectiveness, but in post-silicon, the lack of observability makes coverage measurement problematic. On-chip coverage monitors are a possible solution, but prior research has shown that the overhead is prohibitive for anything beyond a small number of coverage points. This paper presents a novel solution for post-silicon coverage monitoring: fully instrument the design in emulation to sample the relationships between coverage points, and then use this statistical data to choose a small set of coverage points whose coverage provides high probability that all the other coverage points are covered as well; only that small set is instrumented on silicon. To demonstrate the method, we propose a simple feature selection algorithm based on Bayesian networks to choose the small set of coverage points. In experiments emulating a non-trivial SoC, our technique reduces the number of coverage monitors by 92%, yet predicts over 98% probability that all coverage points are covered.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it