Design-for-debug for Aiding Post-silicon Validation

Prof. Nicola Nicolici
McMaster University, Canada

Tuesday, December 9, 2008 from 11:00 am – 12:00pm
Room 57.124 Engineering IV Building

Abstract:
To identify design errors that escape pre-silicon verification, post-silicon validation is becoming an important step in the implementation flow of digital integrated circuits. While many validation problems are tackled on testers, there are hard-to-find design errors that are activated only insystem. A key challenge during in-system debugging is to acquire data from internal circuit's nodes in real-time. In this talk we discuss several basic design-for-debug techniques used for data acquisition during post-silicon validation, as well as some recent research on improving real-time observability.

Short bio:
Nicola Nicolici is an Associate Professor at McMaster University, Canada. His main research interests are in VLSI test and debug and hardware accelerators for scientific applications.