Integration of Hardware Assertions in Systems-on-Chip

Assertions in silicon help post-silicon debug by providing observability of internal properties within a system which are otherwise hard to observe. Besides generating synthesizable assertions, they also need to be integrated in a design. In this paper we have shown how hardware assertions can be integrated in existing on-chip debug infrastructures, i.e., in a scan-based run-stop debug infrastructure and in a debug trace infrastructure. Experimental results on an industrial test SoC show that assertion based bus protocol checkers can be integrated with less than 1% additional area cost, including both the hardware assertions and the additional logic required to integrate the assertions in the SoC.