In-system silicon validation and debug

First-silicon validation and debug require a labor-intensive engineering effort of several months and have become the least predictable and most time-consuming part of a new 90-nm chip's development cycle. Lack of adequate tools and automatic procedures is a big factor in this bottleneck. Other difficulties include nondeterministic operation and lack of time-specific expected values. This article presents a new approach that provides an efficient scalable solution to overcome these difficulties. The end results are a significant reduction of the silicon validation and debug time, and faster discovery and root-cause determination of integration problems, design bugs, and chip defects. © 2008 IEEE.