ASCII codes are alphanumeric codes that represent numbers, alphabets, symbols and special characters in computers. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Whenever we press a key from the keyboard, the corresponding ASCII code goes into the computer.…
Category: DHD
Digital Hardware Design
What is Post-Silicon Validation
Modern day Syetem-on-Chips are so complex that pre-silicon verification is no more the sufficient step to capture all the design bugs. Even with sophisticated verification process, achieving 100% coverage is difficult. Due to this, few bugs escape from the pre-silicon…
Pre-Silicon Verification vs. Post-Silicon Validation
Both Verification and Validation checks for the correctness of the design. These design steps try to detect and localize functional bugs in the system. While pre-silicon verification runs the test cases on the software prototypes of the design on the…
Synthesis in VLSI
Synthesis transforms the simple RTL design into a gate-level netlist with all the constraints as specified by the designer. In simple language, Synthesis is a process that converts the abstract form of design to a properly implemented chip in terms…
ASIC Physical Design Flow
The main steps in ASIC physical design flow are: Design Netlist (after Synthesis) Floorplanning Partitioning Placement Clock-Tree Synthesis (CTS) Routing Physical Verification GDS II Generation These steps are just the basic. A more detailed design flow is presented in the…
Reliability vs. Availability in Fault Tolerance
We have learnt the following definitions of Reliability and Availability from the Fault Tolerance Measures post: Reliability, R(t): Probability that the system has been up continuously during the whole interval [0,t], given it was up at time 0. This measure is suitable…
VLSI Design Flow
The chip design includes different types of processing steps to finish the entire flow. For each and every step, the design process requires a dedicated EDA tool. These tools have the flexibility to import or export different types of files.…
Fault Tolerance Measures
Fault tolerance of electronic system is a major concern for the VLSI engineers. This can be realized from the post Need of Fault Tolerant VLSI System Design. The objective of this post is to introduce the proper tools for fault…
Defects, Errors, and Faults
In Electronics industry incorrectness in products are described in several ways which may create confusion in understanding the terms defect, error and fault. Though these terms are used interchangeably in the field of VLSI testing, let’s try to draw a…
Redundancy in Fault Tolerance
In the previous post we have understood the need of Fault Tolerance in VLSI System Design. A VLSI system can broadly be considered as a union of following 3 layers: Hardware Layer (Processing cores, Memories, etc.) Software Layer (OS, Program…