Using Processor Trace At The System Level
By Ann Steffora-Mutschler, Semiconductor Engineering
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“Processor tracing allows recording of the processor running, which is very useful in debugging crashes and illegal instructions,” said Shaun Giebel, director of product management at OneSpin Solutions. “However, it can take millions of cycles to hit the problem, and debugging such a long trace is challenging. How do you start tracing back to find the source of the problem? How long could it take? Formal verification can help. You specify a property to describe the state/failure that is the symptom of the bug, and then formal engines generate a ‘counter-example’ trace showing how the failure can occur. This will be the minimal possible path back to the source bug, likely many magnitudes shorter than the original processor trace. This approach is used in pre-silicon verification and in debugging errors found during post-silicon validation in the bring-up lab.”
