Incremental Trace-Buffer Insertion for FPGA 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 integrated circuits encapsulate more functionality and complexity, verifying that these devices operate correctly under all scenarios is an increasingly difficult task. Rather than using traditional verification techniques such as software simulation, more and more designers are taking advantage of the significantly higher clock speeds that can be achieved by using field-programmable gate-array (FPGA)-based prototypes. A key challenge to these prototypes is the lack of on-chip observability during debugging; one popular solution is to insert trace-buffers into the design to record a limited set of internal signals, but modifying this trace configuration often requires the entire circuit to be recompiled. In this paper, we propose that the original circuit mapping is fully preserved and incremental techniques are used to eliminate the need for a full recompilation, thereby accelerating the debugging process. By exploiting two opportunities available during trace-insertion: the ability to connect from any point of a signal to any trace-pin, and the internal symmetry of the FPGA architecture, we find that incremental trace-insertion can be 98 times faster than a full recompilation, return a routing solution with a shorter wirelength, and have a negligible effect on the critical-path delay of the original circuit when reclaiming 75% of the leftover memory capacity for tracing.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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