Hybrid Quick Error Detection: Validation and Debug of SoCs Through High-Level Synthesis

Validation and debug challenges of system-on-chips (SoCs) are getting increasingly difficult. As we reach the limits of Dennard scaling, efforts to improve system performance and energy efficiency have resulted in the integration of a wide variety of complex hardware accelerators in SoCs. Hence, it is essential to address the validation and debug of hardware accelerators. High-level synthesis (HLS) is a promising technique to rapidly create customized hardware accelerators. In this paper, we present the hybrid quick error detection (H-QED) approach that overcomes validation and debug challenges for hardware accelerators by leveraging HLS techniques in both the presilicon and post-silicon stages. H-QED improves error detection latencies (time elapsed from when a bug is activated to when it is detected) by 2-5 orders of magnitude with one cycle latencies in presilicon scenarios and bug coverage threefold higher compared to traditional validation techniques. H-QED also uncovered previously unknown bugs in the CHStone benchmark suite, which is widely used by the HLS community. H-QED incurs an 8% accelerator area overhead with negligible silicon performance impact for post-silicon stage, and we also introduce techniques to minimize any possible intrusiveness introduced by H-QED.