Accelerating Reset Domain Crossing Verification With Data Analytics Techniques


By Reetika and Sulabh Kumar Khare As the complexity of integrated circuit (IC) designs continues to rise, the task of verifying these designs has become increasingly challenging. The pace of this growth is staggering, with design complexity doubling roughly every 20 months. This exponential increase places immense pressure on verification processes, which must keep up to ensure that these so... » read more

Elimination Of Functional False Path During RDC Analysis


Reset domain crossing (RDC) issues can occur in sequential designs when the reset of a source register differs from the reset of a destination register, even if the data path is in the same clock domain. This can lead to asynchronous crossing paths and metastability at the destination register. RDC analysis on RTL designs is done to find such metastability issues in a design, which may occur du... » read more

Techniques To Identify Reset Metastability Due To Soft Resets


Modern SoCs are equipped with complex reset architectures to meet the requirements of high-speed interfaces with increased functionality. These complex reset architectures with multiple reset domains, ensure functional recovery from hardware failures and unexpected electronic faults. But the transmission of data across sequential elements that are reset by different asynchronous and soft reset ... » read more

Reset Domain Crossing Verification


By Reetika and Sulabh Kumar Khare To meet low-power and high-performance requirements, system on chip (SoC) designs are equipped with several asynchronous and soft reset signals. These reset signals help to safeguard software and hardware functional safety as they can be asserted to speedily recover the system onboard to an initial state and clear any pending errors or events. By definiti... » read more

Formal Verification Ensures The Perseverance Rover Lands Safely On Mars


By Joe Hupcey III and Kevin Campbell Safely landing a spacecraft anywhere on Mars is a complex, high-risk challenge. Even worse, the most scientifically interesting areas of the planet are guarded by boulders, ditches, and tall cliffs — land formations that aren’t very welcoming to vehicles. Such was the case with the Mars Perseverance Rover's Landing Site: Jezero Crater. It’s not an e... » read more

Early Detection Of Reset Domain Crossing Errors


Many aspects of system-on-chip (SoC) designs are growing, including the numbers of gates, memories, clock domains, reset domains, power domains, on-chip buses, and external interfaces. A recent blog post focused on reset domain crossings (RDCs) and the requirements for effective pre-silicon verification of these trouble-prone structures. If properly applied, a solution meeting these requirement... » read more

Designing Secure and Trusted Silicon Using Shift-Left in Verification


Designing secure silicon requires the design to be stable at all times, it shouldn't enter unknown states at any time to make it vulnerable from the security point of view. This paper identifies different sources of instability such as combinational feedback loop, unguarded clock and reset crossing, unguarded power crossing, etc. These instabilities can lead to unknown value propagation and hig... » read more

Requirements For Exhaustive SoC Reset Domain Crossing Checks


It is common to read that the numbers of clock domains and power domains in system-on-chip (SoC) designs are increasing, but for some reason there is less discussion about resets. There is no doubt that the number of reset domains is also rising; studies have shown that the single reset of twenty years ago has been replaced by a complex network of 40-50 domains in many chips and even 150 in som... » read more

Four Steps To Resolving Reset Domain Crossing Data-Corruption In Automotive SoCs


By Kurt Takara (Siemens EDA), Ankush Sethi (NXP), and Aniruddha Gupta (NXP) Modern automotive SoCs typically contain multiple asynchronous reset signals to ensure systematic functional recovery from unexpected situations and faults. This complex reset architecture leads to a new set of problems such as possible reset domain crossing (RDC) issues. Conventional clock domain crossing (CDC) veri... » read more

Systematic Methodology To Solve Reset Challenges In Automotive SoCs


Modern automotive SoCs typically contain multiple asynchronous reset signals to ensure systematic functional recovery from unexpected situations and faults. This complex reset architecture leads to a new set of problems such as possible reset domain crossing (RDC) issues. The conventional clock domain and CDC verification methodologies cannot identify such critical bugs. In this paper, we prese... » read more

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