Effective and quality technical support in business to business partnerships with focus on the high-tech (semiconductor industry) products

textAbstract Effective and Quality Technical Support in Business to Business Partnerships with focus on the High-Tech (Semiconductor Industry) Products Fred Kishwahili Byabagye, MSE The University of Texas at Austin, 2011 Supervisor: Kyle Lewis Co-Supervisor: Tony Ambler My choice of this thesis topic is very much in line with my passionate desire to contribute and share my experience in the area of Business to Business (B2B) technical support while continuing to explore the constantly evolving challenges involved when a corporation that makes semiconductor products (Original Semiconductor Manufacturer) has to provide effective and efficient quality technical support to another corporation (Original Equipment Manufacturer) that uses the semiconductor product in designing a final product. For example, how does an Original Semiconductor manufacture (OSM) such as AMD or Intel provide effective technical support to an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) such as HP or Dell? This partnership has to be well managed to ensure continuous technical support from new product conception through the sustaining phase of the product. This area of business to business technical support is not well understood because of company Intellectual Property (IP) issues and propriety information involved. This type of activity happens under Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), behind “firewalls” and varies from corporation to corporation. Most people have had experience with or have heard stories about customer service issues between an individual consumer customer and a corporation selling a product (such as buying a PC/Laptop from Dell or HP). This thesis will not explore this area since it is very familiar and well understood. First, by drawing on my observations spanning 16 years working in different customer facing areas for AMD and noting the changes that have taken place in the way B2B technical support has evolved, I will constantly point out scenarios that continuously come up in an effort to deliver quality and effective customer technical support. Second, there is a lot of literature available that explores how the semiconductor industry has changed from companies being component sellers to “solutions providers”. Historically, technical support used to be considered as only necessary after a product had gone into production. However, that model has changed in the current environment of more complex products such as Microprocessors (CPU), System-on-a-Chip (SoC), and Accelerated Processing units (APU). For B2B customer technical support to be effective and high quality, it has to meet and exceed the customers’ expectations throughout the product life-cycle.Engineering Managemen

Towards Cache-Coherent Chiplet-Based Architectures with Wireless Interconnects

Cache-coherent chiplet-based architectures have gained significant attention due to their potential for scalability and improved performance in modern computing systems. However, the interconnects in such architectures often pose challenges in maintaining cache coherence across chiplets, leading to increased latency and energy consumption. This thesis focuses on exploring the feasibility and advantages of integrating wireless interconnects into cache-coherent chiplet-based architectures. Through extensive simulations of 16 and 64 core systems segmented in 4 and 8 chiplet systems with multiple inter-chiplet latencies we debug and obtain traffic data. By studying the inter-chiplet traffic for different chiplet-based configurations and analyzing it in terms of spatial, temporal and time variance we derive that chiplet scaling degrades performance. Further we formulate the impact of hybrid wired and wireless interconnects and assess the potential performance benefits they offer. The findings from this research will contribute to the design and optimization of cache-coherent chiplet-based architectures, shedding light on the practicality and advantages of utilizing wireless interconnects in future computing systems

Pre-validation of SoC via hardware and software co-simulation

Abstract. System-on-chips (SoCs) are complex entities consisting of multiple hardware and software components. This complexity presents challenges in their design, verification, and validation. Traditional verification processes often test hardware models in isolation until late in the development cycle. As a result, cooperation between hardware and software development is also limited, slowing down bug detection and fixing. This thesis aims to develop, implement, and evaluate a co-simulation-based pre-validation methodology to address these challenges. The approach allows for the early integration of hardware and software, serving as a natural intermediate step between traditional hardware model verification and full system validation. The co-simulation employs a QEMU CPU emulator linked to a register-transfer level (RTL) hardware model. This setup enables the execution of software components, such as device drivers, on the target instruction set architecture (ISA) alongside cycle-accurate RTL hardware models. The thesis focuses on two primary applications of co-simulation. Firstly, it allows software unit tests to be run in conjunction with hardware models, facilitating early communication between device drivers, low-level software, and hardware components. Secondly, it offers an environment for using software in functional hardware verification. A significant advantage of this approach is the early detection of integration errors. Software unit tests can be executed at the IP block level with actual hardware models, a task previously only possible with costly system-level prototypes. This enables earlier collaboration between software and hardware development teams and smoothens the transition to traditional system-level validation techniques.Järjestelmäpiirin esivalidointi laitteiston ja ohjelmiston yhteissimulaatiolla. Tiivistelmä. Järjestelmäpiirit (SoC) ovat monimutkaisia kokonaisuuksia, jotka koostuvat useista laitteisto- ja ohjelmistokomponenteista. Tämä monimutkaisuus asettaa haasteita niiden suunnittelulle, varmennukselle ja validoinnille. Perinteiset varmennusprosessit testaavat usein laitteistomalleja eristyksissä kehityssyklin loppuvaiheeseen saakka. Tämän myötä myös yhteistyö laitteisto- ja ohjelmistokehityksen välillä on vähäistä, mikä hidastaa virheiden tunnistamista ja korjausta. Tämän diplomityön tavoitteena on kehittää, toteuttaa ja arvioida laitteisto-ohjelmisto-yhteissimulointiin perustuva esivalidointimenetelmä näiden haasteiden ratkaisemiseksi. Menetelmä mahdollistaa laitteiston ja ohjelmiston varhaisen integroinnin, toimien luonnollisena välietappina perinteisen laitteistomallin varmennuksen ja koko järjestelmän validoinnin välillä. Yhteissimulointi käyttää QEMU suoritinemulaattoria, joka on yhdistetty rekisterinsiirtotason (RTL) laitteistomalliin. Tämä mahdollistaa ohjelmistokomponenttien, kuten laiteajureiden, suorittamisen kohdejärjestelmän käskysarja-arkkitehtuurilla (ISA) yhdessä kellosyklitarkkojen RTL laitteistomallien kanssa. Työ keskittyy kahteen yhteissimulaation pääsovellukseen. Ensinnäkin se mahdollistaa ohjelmiston yksikkötestien suorittamisen laitteistomallien kanssa, varmistaen kommunikaation laiteajurien, matalan tason ohjelmiston ja laitteistokomponenttien välillä. Toiseksi se tarjoaa ympäristön ohjelmiston käyttämiseen toiminnallisessa laitteiston varmennuksessa. Merkittävä etu tästä lähestymistavasta on integraatiovirheiden varhainen havaitseminen. Ohjelmiston yksikkötestejä voidaan suorittaa jo IP-lohkon tasolla oikeilla laitteistomalleilla, mikä on aiemmin ollut mahdollista vain kalliilla järjestelmätason prototyypeillä. Tämä mahdollistaa aikaisemman ohjelmisto- ja laitteistokehitystiimien välisen yhteistyön ja helpottaa siirtymistä perinteisiin järjestelmätason validointimenetelmiin

Embedded Firmware Solutions

Computer scienc

Achieving Functional Correctness in Large Interconnect Systems.

In today's semi-conductor industry, large chip-multiprocessors and systems-on-chip are being developed, integrating a large number of components on a single chip. The sheer size of these designs and the intricacy of the communication patterns they exhibit have propelled the development of network-on-chip (NoC) interconnects as the basis for the communication infrastructure in these systems. Faced with the interconnect's growing size and complexity, several challenges hinder its effective validation. During the interconnect's development, the functional verification process relies heavily on the use of emulation and post-silicon validation platforms. However, detecting and debugging errors on these platforms is a difficult endeavour due to the limited observability, and in turn the low verification capabilities, they provide. Additionally, with the inherent incompleteness of design-time validation efforts, the potential of design bugs escaping into the interconnect of a released product is also a concern, as these bugs can threaten the viability of the entire system. This dissertation provides solutions to enable the development of functionally correct interconnect designs. We first address the challenges encountered during design-time verification efforts, by providing two complementary mechanisms that allow emulation and post-silicon verification frameworks to capture a detailed overview of the functional behaviour of the interconnect. Our first solution re-purposes the contents of in-flight traffic to log debug data from the interconnect's execution. This approach enables the validation of the interconnect using synthetic traffic workloads, while attaining over 80% observability of the routes followed by packets and capturing valuable debugging information. We also develop an alternative mechanism that boosts observability by taking periodic snapshots of execution, thus extending the verification capabilities to run both synthetic traffic and real-application workloads. The collected snapshots enhance detection and debugging support, and they provide observability of over 50% of packets and reconstructs at least half of each of their routes. Moreover, we also develop error detection and recovery solutions to address the threat of design bugs escaping into the interconnect's runtime operation. Our runtime techniques can overcome communication errors without needing to store replicate copies of all in-flight packets, thereby achieving correctness at minimal area costsPhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116741/1/rawanak_1.pd

A generic debug interface for IP-integrated assertions

Der Entwurf von Hardware/Software Systemen ist auf eine solide Verifikationsmethodik angewiesen, die den ganzen Design Flow durchzieht. Viele Konzepte haben eine Erhöhung des Abstraktionsniveaus bei der Entwurfseingabe gemeinsam, wobei der modell-basierte Hardware-Entwurf einen vielversprechenden und sich verbreitenenden Ansatz darstellt. Assertion basierte Verifikation ermöglicht dem Entwickler die Spezifikation von Eigenschaften des Entwurfes und die Aufdeckung von Fällen, in denen diese verletzt werden. Während Assertions in Entwurfs- und Simulationsstadien weit verbreitet sind, ist der Ansatz, diese mit auf dem integrierten Schaltkreis (IC) zu fertigen, neuartig. In dieser Diplomarbeit soll ein von Infineon Technologies entwickeltes, auf UML basierendes Datenmodell, welches zur Erfassung von Entwurfsspezifikation und zur automatischen Code-Generierung genutzt wird dahingehend erweitert werden, die Beschreibung für im IC integrierte Assertions zu ermöglichen. Für diese Zwecke wird ein abstraktes Datenmodell beschrieben werden. Das Assertion Interface soll die spezifikationsgetreue Modellintegration gewährleisten, sowie IC interne Assertionresultate dem umgebenen System über das Interface zugänglich machen und damit zum Debugging während der Laufzeit ermöglichen. Ferner werden die Codegenerierungs Templates erläutert und einBeispielsystem eingeführt, um die beschriebenden Konzepte zu validieren.Nowadays electronic systems design requires fast time to market and solid verification throughout the entire design flow. Many concepts have been researched to raise the level of abstraction during the design entry phase, whereas model-based design is the most promising one. Assertion-based verification enables the developer to specify properties of the design and to get report if these are violated. Assertions are common during development and simulation of electronic products but often are not included in the final silicon. In this thesis an UML-based model defined at Infineon Technologies for capturing design specification information and to generate code automatically using templates, will be extended to allow the description of an abstract debuggable assertion interface for silicon assertions. With help of the assertion interface it shall be possible to verify the correct module integration and to monitor IP-internal assertion checker results. Besides, the code-generation templates for the assertion interface model will be described. To demonstrate the usability of the developed concepts an example system will be introduced to validate the approach.Ilmenau, Techn. Univ., Diplomarbeit, 200

Reusable Automated Agent For Universal Verification Methodology System Testbench

Pre-silicon verification process is an important cog in an application specific integrated chip design cycle. It is considered one of the biggest bottle-neck in modern day design projects. Thus, verification efficiency and productivity has gained a lot of attention lately and will be the driving factor of this research. The purpose of this research is to build a verification solution that actively promotes reusability and interoperability of verification components and improve the automation within the verification solution. These are identified as important concepts to improve verification efficiency and productivity. A state of the art UVM (Universal Verification Methodology) verification solution centered on these concepts is built for the sideband module of a hard memory controller. First, the verification requirements of the sideband module are investigated. Next, existing testbench solutions were evaluated for its reuse capabilities. This is followed by proposing and implementing a testbench architecture that highly reuses existing verification components and be reused friendly itself. Next, the architecture is improved to allow higher level of automation within the testbench. The implemented verification solution is then measured and analysed for its reusability and automation. The result obtained shows the implemented verification solution achieves a reusability of 21.70% in a system level testbench and 49.67% in the standalone sideband verification environment. In addition, the autonomous agent approach implemented in the architecture reduces the test writer's burden by at least 60% and up to 78%