Incremental Trace-Buffer Insertion for FPGA Debug

TL;DR: This paper proposes that the original circuit mapping is fully preserved and incremental techniques are used to eliminate the need for a full recompilation, thereby accelerating the debugging process and exploiting two opportunities available during trace-insertion.

Abstract: As integrated circuits encapsulate more functionality and complexity, verifying that these devices operate correctly under all scenarios is an increasingly difficult task. Rather than using traditional verification techniques such as software simulation, more and more designers are taking advantage of the significantly higher clock speeds that can be achieved by using field-programmable gate-array (FPGA)-based prototypes. A key challenge to these prototypes is the lack of on-chip observability during debugging; one popular solution is to insert trace-buffers into the design to record a limited set of internal signals, but modifying this trace configuration often requires the entire circuit to be recompiled. In this paper, we propose that the original circuit mapping is fully preserved and incremental techniques are used to eliminate the need for a full recompilation, thereby accelerating the debugging process. By exploiting two opportunities available during trace-insertion: the ability to connect from any point of a signal to any trace-pin, and the internal symmetry of the FPGA architecture, we find that incremental trace-insertion can be 98 times faster than a full recompilation, return a routing solution with a shorter wirelength, and have a negligible effect on the critical-path delay of the original circuit when reclaiming 75% of the leftover memory capacity for tracing.