Scalable Signal Selection for Post-Silicon Debug
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
As modern integrated circuits increase in size and complexity, more and more verification effort is necessary to ensure their error-free operation. This has motivated designers to apply post-silicon debugging techniques to their designs, such as by embedding trace instrumentation within. However, a key drawback to this approach is that only a small subset of a chip's internal signals can be traced, but selecting the most effective signals to observe must be determined before fabrication and before the nature of any errors is known. This paper explores the tradeoff between the scalability of automated signal selection algorithms, and the amount of circuit observability that they offer. Three selection methods are presented: a technique that optimizes for observability directly; a method based on the graph-centrality of the circuit's connectivity; and a hybrid technique that combines both algorithms through exploiting the circuit hierarchy. To quantify the observability of each technique, we define the debug difficulty metric to measure how accurately the traced data can be used to resolve a circuit's state behavior. Although we find that the graph-based method offers the least observability of the three algorithms, it was the only method that could be applied to our largest benchmark of over 50 000 flip-flops, computing a selection in less than 90 s. Last, we present a novel application that can only be enabled by these scalable algorithms-speculative debug insertion for field-programmable gate arrays.
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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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