826 research outputs found
The review of heterogeneous design frameworks/Platforms for digital systems embedded in FPGAs and SoCs
Systems-on-a-chip integrate specialized modules to provide well-defined functionality. In order to guarantee its efficiency, designersare careful to choose high-level electronic components. In particular,FPGAs (field-programmable gate array) have demonstrated theirability to meet the requirements of emerging technology. However,traditional design methods cannot keep up with the speed andefficiency imposed by the embedded systems industry, so severalframeworks have been developed to simplify the design process of anelectronic system, from its modeling to its physical implementation.This paper illustrates some of them and presents a comparative studybetween them. Indeed, we have selected design methods of SoC(ESP4ML and HLS4ML, OpenESP, LiteX, RubyRTL, PyMTL,SysPy, PyRTL, DSSoC) and NoC networks on OCN chip (PyOCN)and in general on FPGA (PRGA, OpenFPGA, AnyHLS, PYNQ, andPyLog).The objective of this article is to analyze each tool at several levelsand to discuss the benefit of each in the scientific community. Wewill analyze several aspects constituting the architecture and thestructure of the platforms to make a comparative study of thehardware and software design flows of digital systems.
PyHGL: A Python-based Hardware Generation Language Framework
Hardware generation languages (HGLs) increase hardware design productivity by
creating parameterized modules and test benches. Unfortunately, existing tools
are not widely adopted due to several demerits, including limited support for
asynchronous circuits and unknown states, lack of concise and efficient
language features, and low integration of simulation and verification
functions. This paper introduces PyHGL, an open-source Python framework that
aims to provide a simple and unified environment for hardware generation,
simulation, and verification. PyHGL language is a syntactical superset of
Python, which greatly reduces the lines of code (LOC) and improves productivity
by providing unique features such as dynamic typing, vectorized operations, and
automatic port deduction. In addition, PyHGL integrates an event-driven
simulator that simulates the asynchronous behaviors of digital circuits using
three-state logic. We also propose an algorithm that eliminates the calculation
and transmission overhead of unknown state propagation for binary stimuli. The
results suggest that PyHGL code is up to 6.1x denser than traditional RTL and
generates high-quality synthesizable RTL code. Moreover, the optimized
simulator achieves 2.9x speed up and matches the performance of a commonly used
open-source logic simulator
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Complexity-reduced hardware-based track-trigger for CMS upgrade
This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
is designed to study the results of proton-proton collisions. The Tracker
sub-detector is designed to detect and reconstruct the trajectories of charged
particles produced by the collisions. During the lifetime of the CMS detector,
there have been several upgrades aimed at increasing the chance of discovering
new physics through increased luminosity levels and instrumentation of
advanced technology. The High-Luminosity upgrade optimises the LHC to
accelerate high-energy particles with an average of 200 proton-proton
interactions per bunch crossing. The Level-1 Trigger system promptly analyses
and filters collisions using hardware to reduce the data volume in real-time. For
the upgrade, the trigger mechanism will use a particle trajectory estimator that
discriminates between particles based on their transverse momentum (pT ).
Particles with pT ≥ 2 GeV/c will be transmitted to the Level-1 Track-Trigger
system for trajectory reconstruction within a fixed 3 μs latency. This thesis
presents a novel Hardware-based Multivariate Linear Fitter (MVLF) system
focusing on robustness in tracking efficiency and reduction in logic resource
usage within the specified latency. The system components are implemented in
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), targeting 16 nm FinFET UltraScale+
silicon technology. The development was performed using the High-Level
Synthesis (HLS) automation tools and the Hardware acceleration platform for
Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC). A firmware demonstrator has
been assembled to verify the feasibility and compatibility of the scaled system
with the CMS Level-1 Track-Trigger infrastructure. The system’s performance is
compared to past and current system developments, and the results are
presented accordingly
Using Efficient Path Profiling to Optimize Memory Consumption of On-Chip Debugging for High-Level Synthesis
High-Level Synthesis (HLS) for FPGAs is attracting popularity and is increasingly used to handle complex systems with multiple integrated components. To increase performance and efficiency, HLS flows now adopt several advanced optimization techniques. Aggressive optimizations and system level integration can cause the introduction of bugs that are only observable on-chip. Debugging support for circuits generated with HLS is receiving a considerable attention. Among the data that can be collected on chip for debugging, one of the most important is the state of the Finite State Machines (FSM) controlling the components of the circuit.
However, this usually requires a large amount of memory to trace the behavior during the execution. This work proposes an approach that takes advantage of the HLS information and of the structure of the FSM to compress control flow traces and to integrate optimized components for on-chip debugging. The generated checkers analyze the FSM execution on-fly, automatically notifying when a bug is detected, localizing it and providing data about its cause. The traces are compressed using a software profiling technique, called Efficient Path Profiling (EPP), adapted for the debugging of hardware accelerators generated with HLS. With this technique, the size of the memory used to store control flow traces can be reduced up to 2 orders of magnitude, compared to state-of-the-art
ASSURE: RTL Locking Against an Untrusted Foundry
Semiconductor design companies are integrating proprietary intellectual
property (IP) blocks to build custom integrated circuits (IC) and fabricate
them in a third-party foundry. Unauthorized IC copies cost these companies
billions of dollars annually. While several methods have been proposed for
hardware IP obfuscation, they operate on the gate-level netlist, i.e., after
the synthesis tools embed the semantic information into the netlist. We propose
ASSURE to protect hardware IP modules operating on the register-transfer level
(RTL) description. The RTL approach has three advantages: (i) it allows
designers to obfuscate IP cores generated with many different methods (e.g.,
hardware generators, high-level synthesis tools, and pre-existing IPs). (ii) it
obfuscates the semantics of an IC before logic synthesis; (iii) it does not
require modifications to EDA flows. We perform a cost and security assessment
of ASSURE.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems on 11-Oct-2020,
28-Jan-202
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