You are exactly right about the hand waving. I think it's kind of actually an ad for the "monitoring partners", like this one mentioned in the link. Here is a

You are exactly right about the hand waving. I think it's kind of actually an ad for the "monitoring partners", like this one mentioned in the link. Here is a video from one of them that talks about their "Universal Chip Telemetry" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q6-igEbLt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q6-igEbLt0 In my (dated) experience it's actually mostly talking about production data, like built in self test which are run in hardware test modes on specialized equipment before the parts (or dies) are put on a board or in the system. The other time these are run are when return parts are retested. It's possible some limited amount of die space could be used to store some kind of hardware errors, but in my (dated) experience that would generally be with some kind of small one time programmable memory. If you watch the video there is a lot of detail on how they are going to detect the issues in hardware an basically none on how they actually transmit it off chip.