Towards simulator-like observability for FPGAs
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
The rising complexity of verification has led to an increase in the use of FPGA prototyping, which can run at significantly higher operating frequencies and achieve much higher coverage than logic simulations. However, a key challenge is observability into these devices, which can be solved by embedding trace-buffers to record on-chip signal values. Rather than connecting a predetermined subset of circuits signals to dedicated trace-buffer inputs at compile-time, in this work we propose that a virtual overlay network is built to multiplex all on-chip signals to all on-chip trace-buffers. Subsequently, at debug-time, the designer can choose a signal subset for observation. To minimize its overhead, we build this network out of unused routing multiplexers, and by using optimal bipartite graph matching techniques, we show that any subset of on-chip signals can be connected to 80-90% of the maximum trace-buffer capacity in less than 50 seconds.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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