Design-for-debug for post-silicon validation: Can high-level descriptions help?

Post-silicon validation is an essential step in the design flow, which is needed to demonstrate that the implemented circuit meets its intended behavior. Due to lack of in-system controllability and observability, design-for-debug hardware is employed to aid post-silicon validation. A number of solutions have been proposed to implement the design-for-debug hardware, as well as to analyze the debug data that is acquired. Although the design entry is done at the register-transfer level, the existing approaches to aid post-silicon validation rely primarily on the information extracted from the gate level circuit descriptions. We anticipate that, as the design complexity continues to grow, extracting and processing circuit information at this level will become increasingly difficult. In this paper, we briefly summarize the known art and discuss some possible directions of investigation that can utilize high-level circuit descriptions to augment the existing solutions.