Let's Program the Transistors
Digital Hardware Design
The real-world signals are analog. However, processing, communicating, and storing data in digital form is advantageous over analog form. Therefore, the analog signal is converted to digital form at the transmitter end and again converted back to analog form at the receiver end. The following are multiple advantages of digital over analog. Previous …
Electronic circuits can broadly be divided into two broad categories: Some advantages of digital over analog are as below: Today, digital technology is applied in a wide range of applications. The most common digital end products are computers, television, communication systems, consumer electronics, etc. Sampling and Quantization are the techniques that are used to convert…
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. ASCII has 128 characters that can be represented using 7 bits (00 to 7F in…
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 verification till the actual product on silicon. So, now-a-days industries perform post-silicon validation (commonly known…
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 simulator, post-silicon validation is executed on a few initial hardware prototypes of the design on…
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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 of logic gates. Synthesis takes place in multiple steps: There are various tools which can…
The main steps in ASIC physical design flow are: These steps are just the basic. A more detailed design flow is presented in the picture below: The ASIC physical design flow uses the technology libraries that are provided by the fabrication houses. Technologies are commonly classified on the basis of minimal feature size. The basic…
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 for applications in which even a momentary disruption can prove costly. One example is computer…
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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. The picture below shows the various steps of the design flow: Here is a brief…
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 tolerance measure. A measure is a mathematical abstraction, which expresses only some subset of the object’s…