Reducing Post-Silicon Coverage Monitoring Overhead with Emulation and Bayesian Feature Selection
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".