The GENCOD project : Automated generation of Hardware code for safety critical applications on FPGA targets

International audienceGENCOD is a research project for solutions to automated generation of safe code for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) targets. The paper will describe typical ASIC/FPGA workflow, and current implementation for airborne electronic hardware design. Major stakes in certification for airborne electronic hardware will be discussed. The next part will detail the project, the proposed workflow and the associated tools. We will present the current experimentations. Finally, the conclusion will expose advantages and drawbacks of such approach

From FPGA to ASIC: A RISC-V processor experience

This work document a correct design flow using these tools in the Lagarto RISC- V Processor and the RTL design considerations that must be taken into account, to move from a design for FPGA to design for ASIC

Size, Speed, and Power Analysis for Application-Specific Integrated Circuits Using Synthesis

An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) must not only provide the required functionality at the desired speed but it must also be economical. In the past, minimizing the size of the ASIC was sufficient to accomplish this goal. Today it is increasingly necessary that the ASIC also achieve minimum power dissipation or an optimal combination of speed, size and power, especially in communication and portable electronic devices. The research reported in this thesis describes the implementation of a Huffman encoder and a finite impulse response (FIR) filter using a hardware description language (HDL) and the testing of the corresponding register transfer level (RTL) for functionality. The RTL was targeted for two different libraries, TSMC-0.18 CMOS and the Xilinx Virtex V1000EHQ240-6. The RTL was synthesized and optimized for different sizes, speeds, and power by using the Synopsys Design Compiler, FPGA Compiler II, and Mentor Graphics Spectrum. Cadence place and route tools optimized area, delay, and power of post-layout stages for TSMC-0.18. Xilinx place and route tools were used for the Virtex V1000EHQ240-6. The various ASICs were produced and compared over a range of speed, area, and power. i

Building Blocks for Control System Software

Software implementation of control laws for industrial systems seem straightforward, but is not. The computer code stemming from the control laws is mostly not more than 10 to 30% of the total. A building-block approach for embedded control system development is advocated to enable a fast and efficient software design process.\ud We have developed the CTJ library, Communicating Threads for Java¿,\ud resulting in fundamental elements for creating building blocks to implement communication using channels. Due to the simulate-ability, our building block method is suitable for a concurrent engineering design approach. Furthermore, via a stepwise refinement process, using verification by simulation, the implementation trajectory can be done efficiently

XFVHDL4: A hardware synthesis tool for fuzzy systems

This paper presents a design technique that allows the automatic synthesis of fuzzy inference systems and accelerates the exploration of the design space of these systems. It is based on generic VHDL code generation which can be implemented on a programmable device (FPGA) or an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The set of CAD tools supporting this technique includes a specific environment for designing fuzzy systems, in combination with commercial VHDL simulation and synthesis tools. As demonstrated by the analyzed design examples, the described development strategy speeds up the stages of description, synthesis, and functional verification of fuzzy inference systems.Comunidad Europea FP7-IST-248858Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TEC2008-04920Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-0367

High level behavioural modelling of boundary scan architecture.

This project involves the development of a software tool which enables the integration of the IEEE 1149.1/JTAG Boundary Scan Test Architecture automatically into an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) design. The tool requires the original design (the ASIC) to be described in VHDL-IEEE 1076 Hardware Description Language. The tool consists of the two major elements: i) A parsing and insertion algorithm developed and implemented in 'C'; ii) A high level model of the Boundary Scan Test Architecture implemented in 'VHDL'. The parsing and insertion algorithm is developed to deal with identifying the design Input/Output (I/O) terminals, their types and the order they appear in the ASIC design. It then attaches suitable Boundary Scan Cells to each I/O, except power and ground and inserts the high level models of the full Boundary Scan Architecture into the ASIC without altering the design core structure

System-on-chip Computing and Interconnection Architectures for Telecommunications and Signal Processing

This dissertation proposes novel architectures and design techniques targeting SoC building blocks for telecommunications and signal processing applications. Hardware implementation of Low-Density Parity-Check decoders is approached at both the algorithmic and the architecture level. Low-Density Parity-Check codes are a promising coding scheme for future communication standards due to their outstanding error correction performance. This work proposes a methodology for analyzing effects of finite precision arithmetic on error correction performance and hardware complexity. The methodology is throughout employed for co-designing the decoder. First, a low-complexity check node based on the P-output decoding principle is designed and characterized on a CMOS standard-cells library. Results demonstrate implementation loss below 0.2 dB down to BER of 10^{-8} and a saving in complexity up to 59% with respect to other works in recent literature. High-throughput and low-latency issues are addressed with modified single-phase decoding schedules. A new "memory-aware" schedule is proposed requiring down to 20% of memory with respect to the traditional two-phase flooding decoding. Additionally, throughput is doubled and logic complexity reduced of 12%. These advantages are traded-off with error correction performance, thus making the solution attractive only for long codes, as those adopted in the DVB-S2 standard. The "layered decoding" principle is extended to those codes not specifically conceived for this technique. Proposed architectures exhibit complexity savings in the order of 40% for both area and power consumption figures, while implementation loss is smaller than 0.05 dB. Most modern communication standards employ Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing as part of their physical layer. The core of OFDM is the Fast Fourier Transform and its inverse in charge of symbols (de)modulation. Requirements on throughput and energy efficiency call for FFT hardware implementation, while ubiquity of FFT suggests the design of parametric, re-configurable and re-usable IP hardware macrocells. In this context, this thesis describes an FFT/IFFT core compiler particularly suited for implementation of OFDM communication systems. The tool employs an accuracy-driven configuration engine which automatically profiles the internal arithmetic and generates a core with minimum operands bit-width and thus minimum circuit complexity. The engine performs a closed-loop optimization over three different internal arithmetic models (fixed-point, block floating-point and convergent block floating-point) using the numerical accuracy budget given by the user as a reference point. The flexibility and re-usability of the proposed macrocell are illustrated through several case studies which encompass all current state-of-the-art OFDM communications standards (WLAN, WMAN, xDSL, DVB-T/H, DAB and UWB). Implementations results are presented for two deep sub-micron standard-cells libraries (65 and 90 nm) and commercially available FPGA devices. Compared with other FFT core compilers, the proposed environment produces macrocells with lower circuit complexity and same system level performance (throughput, transform size and numerical accuracy). The final part of this dissertation focuses on the Network-on-Chip design paradigm whose goal is building scalable communication infrastructures connecting hundreds of core. A low-complexity link architecture for mesochronous on-chip communication is discussed. The link enables skew constraint looseness in the clock tree synthesis, frequency speed-up, power consumption reduction and faster back-end turnarounds. The proposed architecture reaches a maximum clock frequency of 1 GHz on 65 nm low-leakage CMOS standard-cells library. In a complex test case with a full-blown NoC infrastructure, the link overhead is only 3% of chip area and 0.5% of leakage power consumption. Finally, a new methodology, named metacoding, is proposed. Metacoding generates correct-by-construction technology independent RTL codebases for NoC building blocks. The RTL coding phase is abstracted and modeled with an Object Oriented framework, integrated within a commercial tool for IP packaging (Synopsys CoreTools suite). Compared with traditional coding styles based on pre-processor directives, metacoding produces 65% smaller codebases and reduces the configurations to verify up to three orders of magnitude

Advances in Architectures and Tools for FPGAs and their Impact on the Design of Complex Systems for Particle Physics

The continual improvement of semiconductor technology has provided rapid advancements in device frequency and density. Designers of electronics systems for high-energy physics (HEP) have benefited from these advancements, transitioning many designs from fixed-function ASICs to more flexible FPGA-based platforms. Today’s FPGA devices provide a significantly higher amount of resources than those available during the initial Large Hadron Collider design phase. To take advantage of the capabilities of future FPGAs in the next generation of HEP experiments, designers must not only anticipate further improvements in FPGA hardware, but must also adopt design tools and methodologies that can scale along with that hardware. In this paper, we outline the major trends in FPGA hardware, describe the design challenges these trends will present to developers of HEP electronics, and discuss a range of techniques that can be adopted to overcome these challenges

Simulating the effects of logic faults in implementation-level VITAL-compliant models

[EN] Simulation-based fault injection is a well-known technique to assess the dependability of hardware designs specified using hardware description languages (HDL). Although logic faults are usually introduced in models defined at the register transfer level (RTL), most accurate results can be obtained by considering implementation-level ones, which reflect the actual structure and timing of the circuit. These models consist of a list of interconnected technology-specific components (macrocells), provided by vendors and annotated with post-place-and-route delays. Macrocells described in the very high speed integrated circuit HDL (VHDL) should also comply with the VHDL initiative towards application specific integrated circuit libraries (VITAL) standard to be interoperable across standard simulators. However, the rigid architecture imposed by VITAL makes that fault injection procedures applied at RTL cannot be used straightforwardly. This work identifies a set of generic operations on VITAL-compliant macrocells that are later used to define how to accurately simulate the effects of common logic fault models. The generality of this proposal is supported by the definition of a platform-specific fault procedure based on these operations. Three embedded processors, implemented using the Xilinx¿s toolchain and SIMPRIM library of macrocells, are considered as a case study, which exposes the gap existing between the robustness assessment at both RTL and implementation-level.This work has been partially funded by the Ministerio de Economia, Industria y Competitividad of Spain under grant agreement no TIN2016-81075-R, and the "Programa de Ayudas de Investigacion y Desarrollo" (PAID) of Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.Tuzov, I.; De-Andrés-Martínez, D.; Ruiz, JC. (2019). Simulating the effects of logic faults in implementation-level VITAL-compliant models. 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Hamburg VHDL archive. https://tams-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/vhdlShaw D, Al-Khalili D, Rozon C (2006) Automatic generation of defect injectable VHDL fault models for ASIC standard cell libraries. Integr VLSI J 39(4):382–406Shaw DB, Al-Khalili D (2003) IC bridge fault modeling for IP blocks using neural network-based VHDL saboteurs. IEEE Trans Comput 10:1285–1297Short KL (2008) VHDL for engineers, 1st edn. Pearson, LondonSieh V, Tschache O, Balbach F (1997) Verify: evaluation of reliability using VHDL-models with embedded fault descriptions. In: International symposium on fault-tolerant computing, pp 32–36Singh L, Drucker L (2004) Advanced verification techniques. Frontiers in electronic testing. Springer, New YorkTuzov I, de Andrés D, Ruiz JC (2017) Dependability-aware design space exploration for optimal synthesis parameters tuning. In: IEEE/IFIP international conference on dependable systems and networks, pp 1–12Tuzov I, de Andrés D, Ruiz JC (2017) Robustness assessment via simulation-based fault injection of the implementation level models of the LEON3, MC8051, and PIC microcontrollers in presence of stuck-at, bit-flip, pulse, and delay fault models [Data set], Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.891316Tuzov I, de Andrés D, Ruiz JC (2018) DAVOS: EDA toolkit for dependability assessment, verification, optimization and selection of hardware models. In: IEEE/IFIP international conference on dependable systems and networks, pp 322–329Tuzov I, Ruiz JC, de Andrés D (2017) Accurately simulating the effects of faults in VHDL models described at the implementation-level. In: European dependable computing conference, pp 10–17Wang LT, Chang YW, Cheng KT (2009) Electronic design automation: synthesis, verification, and test. 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