Rapid RTL-based signal ranking for FPGA prototyping
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the capacity of integrated circuits increases, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure that a chip is free of design errors. Designers are increasingly turning to FPGA prototyping platforms to validate their designs much more extensively than is possible using simulation. A key challenge is one of visibility; signals can only be observed if they can be driven to pins of a chip. To enhance visibility during debug, designers regularly instrument their design with on-chip circuitry to record a small subset of signals at-speed for later off-chip analysis. The selection of which signals should be recorded critically affects the effectiveness of this approach. In this paper, we present an algorithm that ranks all signals in a design based on their predicted importance during validation. Compared to previous techniques, which analyze the circuit at the gate level, our algorithm works directly on the parse-tree representation of the circuit, and hence is orders of magnitude faster than these previous techniques. Our algorithm has been implemented as an integral part of Tektronix Certus, a commercial validation suite.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.004 |
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".