Communication-Centric SoC Debug Using Transactions

The growth in System-on-Chip complexity puts pressure on system verification. Due to limitations in the pre-silicon verification process, errors in hardware and software slip through to the stage when silicon and the complete software stack are first brought together. Finding the remaining errors at this stage is becoming increasing difficult. The authors propose that debugging should be communication-centric at first and based on transactions. They combine run-time, on-chip abstraction of system data to the transaction level, with system-level debug control over the communication infrastructure.