Layout-aware signal selection in reconfigurable architectures

Abstract

Post-silicon validation is an important and increasingly complex task in SoC design methodology. One of the major challenges in post-silicon debug is the limited observability of internal signals. Existing signal selection techniques try to maximize observability by selecting a small set of profitable trace signals. Unfortunately, these techniques do not consider design constraints such as routing congestion in reconfigurable architectures. In this paper, we propose a layout-aware signal selection algorithm that takes into account both observability and routing congestion in field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach can tradeoff between observability and wire-length reduction in FPGA-based designs.