Let's Program the Transistors
Digital Hardware Design
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…
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 fine boundary between the meaning of these terms. Before doing this, we should understand why…
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: Designers introduce several techniques to all these system layers to deal with transient as well as permanent faults, and these techniques incorporate the concept of…
In recent few years VLSI design has achieved remarkable growth. High performance (peta-scale) computing is a reality now and we are expecting exa-scale computing by 2020. We talk about many core processor now a days. Intel’s Xeon Phi (Knights Landing) with 72 cores and IBM’s Kilocore processors with more than 1000 cores are great examples…
The Electronics engineers should know the steps to design a particular circuit. While we study, we directly study the properties of the electronic block and the circuit diagram of the corresponding block. We never think how had we landed up to that particular circuit diagram. For example when we talk about digital Multiplexer, Decoder or Counters; we…
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