31,940 research outputs found
Overview of Hydra: a concurrent language for synchronous digital circuit design
Hydra is a computer hardware description language that integrates several kinds of software tool (simulation, netlist generation and timing analysis) within a single circuit specification. The design language is inherently concurrent, and it offers black box abstraction and general design patterns that simplify the design of circuits with regular structure. Hydra specifications are concise, allowing the complete design of a computer system as a digital circuit within a few pages. This paper discusses the motivations behind Hydra, and illustrates the system with a significant portion of the design of a basic RISC processor
Emulating Digital Logic using Transputer Networks (Very High Parallelism = Simplicity = Performance)
Modern VLSI technology has changed the economic rules by which the balance between processing
power, memory and communications is decided in computing systems. This will have a profound
impact on the design rules for the controlling software. In particular, the criteria for judging efficiency
of the algorithms will be somewhat different. This paper explores some of these implications through
the development of highly parallel and highly distributable algorithms based on occam and transputer
networks. The major results reported are a new simplicity for software designs, a corresponding ability
to reason (formally and informally) about their properties, the reusability of their components and some
real performance figures which demonstrate their practicality. Some guidelines to assist in these designs
are also given. As a vehicle for discussion, an interactive simulator is developed for checking the
functional and timing characteristics of digital logic circuits of arbitrary complexity
Desynchronization: Synthesis of asynchronous circuits from synchronous specifications
Asynchronous implementation techniques, which measure logic delays at run time and activate registers accordingly, are inherently more robust than their synchronous counterparts, which estimate worst-case delays at design time, and constrain the clock cycle accordingly. De-synchronization is a new paradigm to automate the design of asynchronous circuits from synchronous specifications, thus permitting widespread adoption of asynchronicity, without requiring special design skills or tools. In this paper, we first of all study different protocols for de-synchronization and formally prove their correctness, using techniques originally developed for distributed deployment of synchronous language specifications. We also provide a taxonomy of existing protocols for asynchronous latch controllers, covering in particular the four-phase handshake protocols devised in the literature for micro-pipelines. We then propose a new controller which exhibits provably maximal concurrency, and analyze the performance of desynchronized circuits with respect to the original synchronous optimized implementation. We finally prove the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach, by showing its application to a set of real designs, including a complete implementation of the DLX microprocessor architectur
A VHDL-AMS Simulation Environment for an UWB Impulse Radio Transceiver
Ultra-Wide-Band (UWB) communication based on the impulse radio paradigm is becoming increasingly popular. According to the IEEE 802.15 WPAN Low Rate Alternative PHY Task Group 4a, UWB will play a major role in localization applications, due to the high time resolution of UWB signals which allow accurate indirect measurements of distance between transceivers. Key for the successful implementation of UWB transceivers is the level of integration that will be reached, for which a simulation environment that helps take appropriate design decisions is crucial. Owing to this motivation, in this paper we propose a multiresolution UWB simulation environment based on the VHDL-AMS hardware description language, along with a proper methodology which helps tackle the complexity of designing a mixed-signal UWB System-on-Chip. We applied the methodology and used the simulation environment for the specification and design of an UWB transceiver based on the energy detection principle. As a by-product, simulation results show the effectiveness of UWB in the so-called ranging application, that is the accurate evaluation of the distance between a couple of transceivers using the two-way-ranging metho
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Analog and Mixed Signal Verification
More and more electronic systems have components that are not purely digital. Verification of such systems is a much less developed discipline than the digital equivalents and the application of formal (mathematically complete) techniques is a nascent area. In this paper, we will discuss the nature of analog circuit design and describe the way verification is done in practice today. We will describe some âformalâ approaches coming from the analog design community. We will describe some of the approaches to formal verification that have been presented in recent literature. Finally, we will mention some areas where there are opportunities for future work
High-level synthesis under I/O Timing and Memory constraints
The design of complex Systems-on-Chips implies to take into account
communication and memory access constraints for the integration of dedicated
hardware accelerator. In this paper, we present a methodology and a tool that
allow the High-Level Synthesis of DSP algorithm, under both I/O timing and
memory constraints. Based on formal models and a generic architecture, this
tool helps the designer to find a reasonable trade-off between both the
required I/O timing behavior and the internal memory access parallelism of the
circuit. The interest of our approach is demonstrated on the case study of a
FFT algorithm
Latency Optimized Asynchronous Early Output Ripple Carry Adder based on Delay-Insensitive Dual-Rail Data Encoding
Asynchronous circuits employing delay-insensitive codes for data
representation i.e. encoding and following a 4-phase return-to-zero protocol
for handshaking are generally robust. Depending upon whether a single
delay-insensitive code or multiple delay-insensitive code(s) are used for data
encoding, the encoding scheme is called homogeneous or heterogeneous
delay-insensitive data encoding. This article proposes a new latency optimized
early output asynchronous ripple carry adder (RCA) that utilizes single-bit
asynchronous full adders (SAFAs) and dual-bit asynchronous full adders (DAFAs)
which incorporate redundant logic and are based on the delay-insensitive
dual-rail code i.e. homogeneous data encoding, and follow a 4-phase
return-to-zero handshaking. Amongst various RCA, carry lookahead adder (CLA),
and carry select adder (CSLA) designs, which are based on homogeneous or
heterogeneous delay-insensitive data encodings which correspond to the
weak-indication or the early output timing model, the proposed early output
asynchronous RCA that incorporates SAFAs and DAFAs with redundant logic is
found to result in reduced latency for a dual-operand addition operation. In
particular, for a 32-bit asynchronous RCA, utilizing 15 stages of DAFAs and 2
stages of SAFAs leads to reduced latency. The theoretical worst-case latencies
of the different asynchronous adders were calculated by taking into account the
typical gate delays of a 32/28nm CMOS digital cell library, and a comparison is
made with their practical worst-case latencies estimated. The theoretical and
practical worst-case latencies show a close correlation....Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1704.0761
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