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Compressing Cache State for Postsilicon Processor Debug
April 2011 (vol. 60 no. 4)
pp. 484-497
ASCII Text
x 
 
Preeti Ranjan Panda, M. Balakrishnan, Anant Vishnoi, "Compressing Cache State for Postsilicon Processor Debug," IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 60, no. 4, pp. 484-497, April, 2011.
 
 
BibTex
x
 
@article{ 10.1109/TC.2010.123,
author = {Preeti Ranjan Panda and M. Balakrishnan and Anant Vishnoi},
title = {Compressing Cache State for Postsilicon Processor Debug},
journal ={IEEE Transactions on Computers},
volume = {60},
number = {4},
issn = {0018-9340},
year = {2011},
pages = {484-497},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TC.2010.123},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}
 
 
RefWorks Procite/RefMan/Endnote
x 
 
TY - JOUR
JO - IEEE Transactions on Computers
TI - Compressing Cache State for Postsilicon Processor Debug
IS - 4
SN - 0018-9340
SP484
EP497
EPD - 484-497
A1 - Preeti Ranjan Panda,
A1 - M. Balakrishnan,
A1 - Anant Vishnoi,
PY - 2011
KW - Postsilicon validation
KW - processor debug
KW - cache compression.
VL - 60
JA - IEEE Transactions on Computers
ER -
 
Preeti Ranjan Panda, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi
M. Balakrishnan, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi
Anant Vishnoi, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi
During postsilicon processor debugging, we need to frequently capture and dump out the internal state of the processor. Since internal state constitutes all memory elements, the bulk of which is composed of cache, the problem is essentially that of transferring cache contents off-chip, to a logic analyser. In order to reduce the transfer time and save expensive logic analyser memory, we propose to compress the cache contents on their way out. We present a hardware compression engine for cache data using a Cache-Aware Compression strategy that exploits knowledge of the cache fields and their behavior to achieve an effective compression. Experimental results indicate that the technique results in 7-31 percent better compression than one that treats the data as just one long bit stream. We also describe and evaluate a parallel compression architecture that uses multiple compression engines, resulting in a 54 percent reduction in transfer time.

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Index Terms:
Postsilicon validation, processor debug, cache compression.
Citation:
Preeti Ranjan Panda, M. Balakrishnan, Anant Vishnoi, "Compressing Cache State for Postsilicon Processor Debug," IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 60, no. 4, pp. 484-497, April 2011, doi:10.1109/TC.2010.123
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