Low Cost Debug Architecture using Lossy Compression for Silicon Debug

The size of on-chip trace buffers used for at-speed silicon debug limits the observation window in any debug session. Whenever the debug experiment can be repeated, we propose a novel architecture for at-speed silicon debug that enables a methodology where the designer can iteratively zoom only in the intervals containing erroneous samples. When compared to increasing the size of the trace buffer, the proposed architecture has a small impact on silicon area, while significantly reducing the number of debug sessions.