StateReveal: Enabling Checkpointing of FPGA Designs with Buried State
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 ability to save and restore the entire state of an FPGA design is essential for hardware checkpointing, which enables live migration, fault recovery, and novel debugging flows. However, hard blocks such as block RAMs and DSP blocks have state elements that cannot be saved or restored using conventional checkpointing techniques such as readback. This results in an incomplete checkpoint, thereby preventing checkpointing of most FPGA designs. In this paper, we propose general techniques that allow a complete checkpoint to be captured and loaded even when a design contains inaccessible state elements. The proposed techniques include using multi-cycle capture and inserting capture registers that add observability and controllability of this buried state. Moreover, we present StateReveal, a tool that detects the presence of inaccessible state elements in a design and automatically inserts the required capture registers. This enables checkpointing of designs that contain fully registered block RAMs and pipelined DSP blocks, which was not previously feasible. We verify the ability to capture and load a complete checkpoint on several designs using an enhanced checkpointing framework that supports multi-cycle capture. StateReveal currently supports Xilinx FPGAs, and the added circuitry has a low timing overhead of 5% and an acceptable area overhead that averages 19 LUTs and 35 registers per hard block.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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