On Automated Trigger Event Generation in Post-Silicon Validation

When searching for functional bugs in silicon, debug data is acquired after a trigger event occurs. A trigger event can be configured at run-time using a set of control registers that uniquely identify the event that initiates data acquisition. Nonetheless the values loaded in these programmable registers interact only with a set of pre-defined trigger signals that are selected at design-time. If the state conditions required for triggering cannot be expressed directly in terms of the pre-defined trigger signals, the common practice is that the designer manually searches for an equivalent trigger event that can be programmed on-chip. In this paper we investigate if trigger events can be automatically generated from a set of state conditions.