Developing Robust Finite State Machines Code With Lint Tools


As design size and complexity grows, the design verification effort grows even more. It takes significant amount of time to thoroughly verify complex control logic of a design, which is the key and the most critical component of design functionality. One of the most common design patterns in the control logic design are finite state machines. They could be designed in different styles, state an... » read more

A Reliable I/O Ring For A Reliable SoC


What is an input/output (I/O) ring, and why should I care about it? If you’re a system-on-chip (SoC) designer, you had better know the answer to that question. SoCs are the darlings of the semiconductor industry—they combine all the typical functionality of a computer (central processing unit (CPU), memory, input/output (I/O) ports, and storage) on a single chip. They’re particularly popu... » read more

Safety Islands In Safety-Critical Hardware


Safety and security have certain aspects in common so it shouldn’t be surprising that some ideas evolving in one domain find echoes in the other. In hardware design, a significant trend has been to push security-critical functions into a hardware root-of-trust (HRoT) core, following a philosophy of putting all (or most) of those functions in one basket and watching that basket very carefully.... » read more

A Glossary For Chip And Semiconductor IP Security And Trust


A significant portion of electronic system vulnerabilities involves hardware. In 2015 the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE-MITRE) database recorded 6,488 vulnerabilities. A considerable proportion (43%) can be classified as software-assisted hardware vulnerabilities (see Fig. 1). The discovery of Meltdown and Spectre in January 2018 has sparked a series of investigations into hardware ... » read more

Does System Design Still Need Abstraction?


About 15 years ago, the assumption in the EDA industry was that system design would be inevitable. The transition from gate-level design to a new entry point at the register transfer level (RTL) seemed complete with logic synthesis becoming well-adopted. The next step seemed to be so obvious at the time: High-level synthesis (HLS) and transaction-based development beyond RTL—also taking into ... » read more

5G Needs Cohesive Pre- And Post-Silicon Verification


While 5G doesn’t start from a clean slate, it does make significant changes to the 4G architecture. These changes mean that the ecosystem from chips to operators is evolving, giving opportunities to more companies to engage in this growing market. Realignment in fronthaul, midhaul and backhaul In particular, the radio access network (RAN) has been redefined as Cloud RAN (sometimes called ... » read more

Functional Safety Implementation Goes Mainstream


Electronics engineers are being thrust into the automotive market like never before. The move to electrify automobiles, along with the advent of self-driving cars, means that silicon designers will be designing ever more sophisticated automotive ICs. But cars aren’t like most other electronic systems; it’s imperative that they cause no harm should they fail. This brings us to the realm o... » read more

HW/SW Co-Verification For Hybrid Systems


Heterogeneous SoC architectures such as Zynq have become very popular recently due to the combination of programmable logic (FPGA) and processing system (ARM) integrated into a single chip. Developing a design using such hybrid systems causes complexity in design verification stages. To help address this complexity, Aldec introduced support for QEMU for co-verification in our HES.Proto-AXI host... » read more

Using HLS To Improve Algorithms


Can an HLS optimization tool outperform expert-level hand-optimizations? A recently published white paper examines how SLX FPGA is used to optimize a secure hash algorithm. T the results are compared to a competition-winning hand-optimized HLS implementation of the same algorithm. This approach provides a nearly 400x speed-up over the unoptimized implementation and even outperforms the hand ... » read more

High-Level Design And High-Level Verification


Not so long ago, some EDA vendors were painting a very attractive picture of chip design in the then-near future. The idea was that an architectural team would write a single description of the complete system in some high-level language, usually C/C++/SystemC, and that a new class of EDA tool would automatically partition the design into hardware and software, choosing the functionality of eac... » read more

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