Manoj Dusanapudi

Post-Silicon Validation of the IBM POWER8 Processor

The post-silicon validation phase in a processors design life cycle is geared towards finding all remaining bugs in the system. It is, in fact, our last opportunity to find functional and electrical bugs in the design before shipping it to customers. In this paper, we provide a high-level overview of the methodology and technologies put into use as part of the POWER8 post-silicon functional validation phase. We describe the results and list the primary factors that contributed to this highly successful bring-up.

Debugging post-silicon fails in the IBM POWER8 bring-up lab

Debugging post-silicon fails continues to be a difficult problem that is becoming even more challenging as chips integrate more functionality and implement increasingly complicated functions. Additionally, the complexity of hardware systems, coupled with the difficulty in observing the state of the system that led to the failure, make the debugging effort a unique challenge. In this paper, we review the techniques and mechanisms used to facilitate effective debugging in the POWER8™ processor post-silicon validation phase. We further describe several functional bugs and describe the debugging process that drove the identification of their root cause.