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

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

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

Agile Standards


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Lu Dai, chairman for Accellera and senior director of engineering at Qualcomm, to discuss what's changing in standards development. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Accellera has had a great first half of the year. Dai: Yes, we are only half way through the year and yet we got Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS) out, the SystemC CCI ... » read more

Partitioning With Ease


Modern ASIC and SoC designs have increased in complexity such that multiple FPGAs of the largest capacity are now required to prototype the entire functionality of the design. As design sizes increase, more and more FPGAs are required. The capacity and pin limitations of FPGAs create constraints for how the ASIC/SoC design can be mapped into the FPGAs. Aldec’s HES-DVM's prototyping mode accou... » read more

Could Liquid IP Lead To Better Chips?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the benefits that could come from making IP available as abstract blocks instead of RTL implementations with Mark Johnstone, technical director for Electronic Design Automation for [getentity id="22499" e_name="NXP"] Semiconductor; [getperson id="11489" p_name="Drew Wingard"], CTO at [getentity id="22605" e_name="Sonics"]; Bryan Bowyer, director of ... » read more

Improving VHDL


For the past several years, I have had the privilege to chair the IEEE 1076 VHDL working group. In March, we handed off the revisions to the VHDL LRM to our technical editor to finalize the document for balloting. As we are waiting for the standards process to finish up, I thought I would share my favorite new additions. Let me start with an executive summary: VHDL-2017 plus Open Source VHDL... » read more

The Problem With Clocks


The synchronous digital design paradigm has enabled us to design circuits that are well controlled, but that is only true if the clocks themselves are well controlled. While overdesign techniques ensured that to be the case in early ASIC development, designs today cannot afford such luxuries. As we strive for lower power and higher operating frequencies, the clock has become a critical desig... » read more

What Is Portable Stimulus?


When [getentity id="22028" e_name="Accellera"] first formed the [getentity id="22863" comment="Portable Stimulus Working Group”] and gave it that name, I was highly concerned. I expressed my frustration that the name, while fitting with what most people thought [getkc id="10" kc_name="verification"] is about, does not reflect the true nature of the standard being worked on. In short, it is no... » read more

← Older posts