On Bypassing Blocking Bugs during Post-Silicon Validation

Design errors (or bugs) inadvertently escape the pre- silicon verification process. Before committing to a re-spin, it is expected that the escaped bugs have been identified during post-silicon validation. This is however hindered by the presence of blocking bugs in one erroneous module that inhibit the search for bugs in other parts of the chip that process data received from the erroneous module. In this paper we discuss how to design a novel embedded debug module that can bypass blocking bugs and aid the designer in validating the first silicon.