# A Communication-Centric Observability Selection for Post-Silicon System-on-Chip Integration Debug

## TL;DR

This paper proposes communication event selection methods guided by system protocols to improve observability in post-silicon SoC debugging, enabling better reconstruction of component interactions during system execution.

## Contribution

It introduces communication-centric selection techniques optimized for on-chip tracing, enhancing observability in post-silicon validation of complex multicore SoCs.

## Key findings

- Improved reconstruction accuracy of system communication during debugging.
- Enhanced information inference from limited observability traces.
- Validated effectiveness on a multicore SoC prototype.

## Abstract

Reconstruction of how components communicate with each other during system execution is crucial for debugging system-on-chip designs. However, limited observability is the major obstacle to the efficient and accurate reconstruction in the post-silicon validation stage. This paper addresses that problem by proposing several communication event selection methods guided by system-level communication protocols. Such methods are optimized for on-chip communication event tracing infrastructure to enhance observability. The effectiveness of these methods are demonstrated with experiments on a non-trivial multicore SoC prototype. The results show that with the proposed method, more comprehensive information on system internal execution can be inferred from traces under limited observability.