Equivalence Checking of Digital Circuits


Book Description

Hardware veri?cation is the process of checking whether a design conforms to its speci?cations of functionality and timing. In today’s design processes it becomes more and more important. Very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits and the resulting digital systems have conquered a place in almost all areas of our life, even in security sensitive applications. Complex digital systems control airplanes, have been used in banks and on intensive-care units. Hence, the demand for error-free designs is more important than ever. In addition, economic reasons underline this demand as well. The design and production process of present day VLSI-circuits is highly time- and cost-intensive. Mo- over, it is nearly impossible to repair integrated circuits. Thus, it is desirable to detect design errors early in the design process and not just after producing the prototype chip. All these facts are re?ected by developing and prod- tion statistics of present day companies. For example, In?neon Technologies [118] assumed that about 60% to 80% of the overall design time was spent for veri?cation in 2000. Other sources cite the 3-to-1 head count ratio between veri?cation engineers and logic designers. This shows that verifying logical correctness of the design of hardware systems is a major gate to the problem of time-to-market (cf. [113]). With the chip complexity constantly increasing, the dif?culty as well as the - portance of functional veri?cation of new product designs has been increased. It is not only more important to get error-free designs.




Digital System Verification


Book Description

Integrated circuit capacity follows Moore's law, and chips are commonly produced at the time of this writing with over 70 million gates per device. Ensuring correct functional behavior of such large designs before fabrication poses an extremely challenging problem. Formal verification validates the correctness of the implementation of a design with respect to its specification through mathematical proof techniques. Formal techniques have been emerging as commercialized EDA tools in the past decade. Simulation remains a predominantly used tool to validate a design in industry. After more than 50 years of development, simulation methods have reached a degree of maturity, however, new advances continue to be developed in the area. A simulation approach for functional verification can theoretically validate all possible behaviors of a design but requires excessive computational resources. Rapidly evolving markets demand short design cycles while the increasing complexity of a design causes simulation approaches to provide less and less coverage. Formal verification is an attractive alternative since 100% coverage can be achieved; however, large designs impose unrealistic computational requirements. Combining formal verification and simulation into a single integrated circuit validation framework is an attractive alternative. This book focuses on an Integrated Design Validation (IDV) system that provides a framework for design validation and takes advantage of current technology in the areas of simulation and formal verification resulting in a practical validation engine with reasonable runtime. After surveying the basic principles of formal verification and simulation, this book describes the IDV approach to integrated circuit functional validation. Table of Contents: Introduction / Formal Methods Background / Simulation Approaches / Integrated Design Validation System / Conclusion and Summary




Formal Equivalence Checking and Design Debugging


Book Description

Formal Equivalence Checking and Design Debugging covers two major topics in design verification: logic equivalence checking and design debugging. The first part of the book reviews the design problems that require logic equivalence checking and describes the underlying technologies that are used to solve them. Some novel approaches to the problems of verifying design revisions after intensive sequential transformations such as retiming are described in detail. The second part of the book gives a thorough survey of previous and recent literature on design error diagnosis and design error correction. This part also provides an in-depth analysis of the algorithms used in two logic debugging software programs, ErrorTracer and AutoFix, developed by the authors. From the Foreword: `With the adoption of the static sign-off approach to verifying circuit implementations the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) industry will experience the first radical methodological revolution since the adoption of logic synthesis. Equivalence checking is one of the two critical elements of this methodological revolution. This book is timely for either the designer seeking to better understand the mechanics of equivalence checking or for the CAD researcher who wishes to investigate well-motivated research problems such as equivalence checking of retimed designs or error diagnosis in sequential circuits.' Kurt Keutzer, University of California, Berkeley




Functional Design Errors in Digital Circuits


Book Description

Functional Design Errors in Digital Circuits Diagnosis covers a wide spectrum of innovative methods to automate the debugging process throughout the design flow: from Register-Transfer Level (RTL) all the way to the silicon die. In particular, this book describes: (1) techniques for bug trace minimization that simplify debugging; (2) an RTL error diagnosis method that identifies the root cause of errors directly; (3) a counterexample-guided error-repair framework to automatically fix errors in gate-level and RTL designs; (4) a symmetry-based rewiring technology for fixing electrical errors; (5) an incremental verification system for physical synthesis; and (6) an integrated framework for post-silicon debugging and layout repair. The solutions provided in this book can greatly reduce debugging effort, enhance design quality, and ultimately enable the design and manufacture of more reliable electronic devices.




Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems, FORMATS 2022, held in Warsaw, Poland, in September 2022. The 12 full papers together with 2 short papers that were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions are presented in this volume with 3 full-length papers associated with invited/anniversary talks. The papers focus on topics such as modelling, design and analysis of timed computational systems. The conference aims in real-time issues in hardware design, performance analysis, real-time software, scheduling, semantics and verification of real-timed, hybrid and probabilistic systems.




Evolvable Hardware


Book Description

This book covers the basic theory, practical details and advanced research of the implementation of evolutionary methods on physical substrates. Most of the examples are from electronic engineering applications, including transistor-level design and system-level implementation. The authors present an overview of the successes achieved, and the book will act as a point of reference for both academic and industrial researchers.




VLSI-SoC: Design and Engineering of Electronics Systems Based on New Computing Paradigms


Book Description

This book contains extended and revised versions of the best papers presented at the 26th IFIP WG 10.5/IEEE International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration, VLSI-SoC 2018, held in Verona, Italy, in October 2018. The 13 full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from the 27 papers (out of 106 submissions) presented at the conference. The papers discuss the latest academic and industrial results and developments as well as future trends in the field of System-on-Chip (SoC) design, considering the challenges of nano-scale, state-of-the-art and emerging manufacturing technologies. In particular they address cutting-edge research fields like heterogeneous, neuromorphic and brain-inspired, biologically-inspired, approximate computing systems.




Electronic Design Automation for IC Implementation, Circuit Design, and Process Technology


Book Description

The second of two volumes in the Electronic Design Automation for Integrated Circuits Handbook, Second Edition, Electronic Design Automation for IC Implementation, Circuit Design, and Process Technology thoroughly examines real-time logic (RTL) to GDSII (a file format used to transfer data of semiconductor physical layout) design flow, analog/mixed signal design, physical verification, and technology computer-aided design (TCAD). Chapters contributed by leading experts authoritatively discuss design for manufacturability (DFM) at the nanoscale, power supply network design and analysis, design modeling, and much more. New to This Edition: Major updates appearing in the initial phases of the design flow, where the level of abstraction keeps rising to support more functionality with lower non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs Significant revisions reflected in the final phases of the design flow, where the complexity due to smaller and smaller geometries is compounded by the slow progress of shorter wavelength lithography New coverage of cutting-edge applications and approaches realized in the decade since publication of the previous edition—these are illustrated by new chapters on 3D circuit integration and clock design Offering improved depth and modernity, Electronic Design Automation for IC Implementation, Circuit Design, and Process Technology provides a valuable, state-of-the-art reference for electronic design automation (EDA) students, researchers, and professionals.




VLSI Design and Test


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st International Symposium on VLSI Design and Test, VDAT 2017, held in Roorkee, India, in June/July 2017. The 48 full papers presented together with 27 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 246 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections named: digital design; analog/mixed signal; VLSI testing; devices and technology; VLSI architectures; emerging technologies and memory; system design; low power design and test; RF circuits; architecture and CAD; and design verification.




Applied Formal Verification : For Digital Circuit Design


Book Description

Formal verification is a powerful new digital design method In this cutting-edge tutorial, two of the field's best known authors team up to show designers how to efficiently apply Formal Verification, along with hardware description languages like Verilog and VHDL, to more efficiently solve real-world design problems.




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