Reversi: Post-silicon validation system for modern microprocessors

— Verification remains an integral and crucial phase of today’s microprocessor design and manufacturing process. Unfortunately, with soaring design complexities and decreasing time-to-market windows, today’s verification approaches are incapable of fully validating a microprocessor before its release to the public. Increasingly, post-silicon validation is deployed to detect complex functional bugs in addition to exposing electrical and manufacturing defects. This is due to the significantly higher execution performance offered by post-silicon methods, compared to pre-silicon approaches. Validation in the postsilicon domain is predominantly carried out by executing constrained-random test instruction sequences directly on a hardware prototype. However, to identify errors, the state obtained from executing tests directly in hardware must be compared to the one produced by an architectural simulation of the design’s golden model. Therefore, the speed of validation is severely l...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICCD
• Authors: Ilya Wagner, Valeria Bertacco
• Keywords: Costly Simulation Step, Hardware, ICCD 2008, Post-silicon Validation, Reversi Generates Tests