Hardware Implementation Of A Random Gumber Generator On A FPGA


A new research paper titled "FPGA Random Number Generator" was published by a researcher at Johns Hopkins University. According to the paper's abstract: "This paper offers a proof-of-concept for creating a verilog-based hardware design that utilizes random measurement and scrambling algorithms to generate 32-bit random synchronously with a single clock cycle on a field-programmable-gate-arr... » read more

Gaps In The AI Debug Process


When an AI algorithm is deployed in the field and gives an unexpected result, it's often not clear whether that result is correct. So what happened? Was it wrong? And if so, what caused the error? These are often not simple questions to answer. Moreover, as with all verification problems, the only way to get to the root cause is to break the problem down into manageable pieces. The semico... » read more

High-Level Synthesis For RISC-V


High-quality RISC-V implementations are becoming more numerous, but it is the extensibility of the architecture that is driving a lot of design activity. The challenge is designing and implementing custom processors without having to re-implement them every time at the register transfer level (RTL). There are two types of high-level synthesis (HLS) that need to be considered. The first is ge... » read more

A Price To Be Paid


Ancient wisdom says you should be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it. This was certainly true many times during my career within EDA, and I am sure it is still happening today. Sometimes the outcome was not what was wanted, or the price was higher than expected. As an example, consider VHDL, the language that was meant to correct the problems of Verilog. One of the probl... » read more

The Trouble With Semantics


Semantics are important. They tell us what something means. Without semantics you just have a jumble of syntax. The better defined the semantics are, the less likely something is to be mis-interpreted because they can be more rigidly analyzed. The semantics of the English language are not very well defined, which is why it is impossible to write a specification where everyone agrees upon wha... » read more

Scan Diagnosis


Jayant D’Souza, product manager at Mentor, a Siemens Business, explains the difference between scan test and scan diagnosis, what causes values in a scan test to change, how this can be used to hone in on the actual cause of a failure in a design, and how to utilize test hardware more efficiently. » read more

Synthesizing Hardware From Software


The ability to automatically generate optimized hardware from software was one of the primary tenets of system-level design automation that was never fully achieved. The question now is whether that will ever happen, and whether it is just a matter of having the right technology or motivation to make it possible. While high-level synthesis (HLS) did come out of this work and has proven to be... » read more

How To Optimize Verification


The rate of improvement in verification tools and methodologies has been nothing short of staggering, but that has created new kinds of problems for verification teams. Over the past 20 years, verification has transformed from a single language (Verilog) and tool (simulator) to utilizing many languages (testbench languages, assertion languages, coverage languages, constraint languages), many... » read more

Taming Concurrency


Concurrency adds complexity for which the industry lacks appropriate tools, and the problem has grown to the point where errors can creep into designs with no easy or consistent way to detect them. In the past, when chips were essentially a single pipeline, this wasn't a problem. In fact, the early pioneers of EDA created a suitable language to describe and contain the necessary concurrency ... » read more

Enabling Cheaper Design


While the EDA industry tends to focus on cutting edge designs, where design costs are a minor portion of the total cost of product, the electronics industry has a very long tail. The further along the tail you go, the more significant design costs become as a percent of total cost. Many of those designs are traditionally built using standard parts, such as microcontrollers, but as additional... » read more

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