A Methodology for Automated Design of Embedded Bit-flips Detectors in Post-Silicon Validation

Post-silicon validation is concerned with detecting design errors that escape to silicon prototypes and need to be fixed before committing to high-volume manufacturing. Electrical errors are particularly difficult to catch during the pre-silicon phase because of the insufficient accuracy of device models, which is often traded-off against simulation time. This challenge is further aggravated by the rising number of voltage domains, especially if subtle errors are excited in unique electrical states. Since these electrically-induced subtle errors most commonly manifest in the logic domain as bit-flips, to the best of our knowledge there are no systematic methods to design embedded hardware monitors for generic logic blocks that can detect bit-flips with low detection latency. Toward this goal, we propose a methodology that relies on design assertions that are ranked based on their potential to detect bit-flips and subsequently mapped into user-constrained embedded hardware monitors with the aim to increase bit-flip coverage estimate.