Numerical simulation and modelling have been growing in importance and seeing steadily increasing practical application. The proliferation of applications and physical domains for which simulation technologies are now needed, compounded by generally increased complexity, has expanded the scope of numerical simulation and modelling within CAD and spurred new research directions. Numerical Simulation and Modelling of Electronic and Biochemical Systems provides an introduction to the fundamentals of numerical simulation, and to the basics of modelling electronic circuits and biochemical reactions. The emphasis is on capturing a minimal set of important concepts succinctly, but concretely enough that the reader will be left with an adequate foundation for further independent exploration. Starting from mathematical models of basic electronic elements, circuits are modelled as nonlinear differential-algebraic equation (DAE) systems. Two basic techniques - quiescent steady state and transient - for solving these differential equations systems are then developed. It is then shown how biochemical reactions can also be modelled deterministically as DAEs. Following this, frequency domain techniques for finding sinusoidal steady states of linear DAEs are developed, as are direct and adjoint techniques for computing parameter sensitivities and the effects of stationary random noise. For readers interested in a glimpse of topics beyond these basics, an introduction to nonlinear periodic steady state methods (harmonic balance and shooting) and the multitime partial differential equation formulation is provided. Also provided is an overview of model order reduction, an important topic of current research that has roots in numerical simulation algorithms. Finally, sample applications of nonlinear oscillator macromodels - in circuits (PLLs), biochemical reaction-diffusion systems and nanoelectronics - are presented.
{"title":"Numerical Simulation and Modelling of Electronic and Biochemical Systems","authors":"J. Roychowdhury","doi":"10.1561/1000000009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1000000009","url":null,"abstract":"Numerical simulation and modelling have been growing in importance and seeing steadily increasing practical application. The proliferation of applications and physical domains for which simulation technologies are now needed, compounded by generally increased complexity, has expanded the scope of numerical simulation and modelling within CAD and spurred new research directions. Numerical Simulation and Modelling of Electronic and Biochemical Systems provides an introduction to the fundamentals of numerical simulation, and to the basics of modelling electronic circuits and biochemical reactions. The emphasis is on capturing a minimal set of important concepts succinctly, but concretely enough that the reader will be left with an adequate foundation for further independent exploration. Starting from mathematical models of basic electronic elements, circuits are modelled as nonlinear differential-algebraic equation (DAE) systems. Two basic techniques - quiescent steady state and transient - for solving these differential equations systems are then developed. It is then shown how biochemical reactions can also be modelled deterministically as DAEs. Following this, frequency domain techniques for finding sinusoidal steady states of linear DAEs are developed, as are direct and adjoint techniques for computing parameter sensitivities and the effects of stationary random noise. For readers interested in a glimpse of topics beyond these basics, an introduction to nonlinear periodic steady state methods (harmonic balance and shooting) and the multitime partial differential equation formulation is provided. Also provided is an overview of model order reduction, an important topic of current research that has roots in numerical simulation algorithms. Finally, sample applications of nonlinear oscillator macromodels - in circuits (PLLs), biochemical reaction-diffusion systems and nanoelectronics - are presented.","PeriodicalId":42137,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Electronic Design Automation","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84795327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A wealth of material has been published over the past 30 years specifically related to the theory and technical aspects of property languages and assertion-based techniques. However, as any field of study matures, it becomes necessary to determine if the theories, algorithms, and concepts have grown beyond the bounds of research to become an integral solution to a problem in industry. To understand any solution, it is necessary to understand the problem. For example, debugging, on average, has grown to consume more than 60% of today's ASIC and SoC verification effort. Clearly, this is a topic the industry must address, and some organizations have done just that. Those that have adopted an assertion-based verification (ABV) methodology have seen a significant reduction in simulation debugging time (as much as 50% [1,47]) due to improved observability. Furthermore, organizations that have embraced an ABV methodology are able to take advantage of more advanced verification techniques, such as formal property checking, thus improving their overall verification quality and results. This paper examines the application of ABV in today's electronic design industry to address specific challenges of poor observability and controllability during the verification process. Statistics illustrating successful application of both low-level and high-level assertions are presented. While the process of writing assertions is fairly well understood by those skilled in the art — the process of creating higher-level assertion-based IP that must communicate with other components in a contemporary transaction-level modeling (TLM) simulation environment, is not. Hence, this paper provides a set of steps (in a tutorial fashion) for creating assertion-based IP.
{"title":"Applied Assertion-Based Verification: An Industry Perspective","authors":"H. Foster","doi":"10.1561/1000000013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1000000013","url":null,"abstract":"A wealth of material has been published over the past 30 years specifically related to the theory and technical aspects of property languages and assertion-based techniques. However, as any field of study matures, it becomes necessary to determine if the theories, algorithms, and concepts have grown beyond the bounds of research to become an integral solution to a problem in industry. To understand any solution, it is necessary to understand the problem. For example, debugging, on average, has grown to consume more than 60% of today's ASIC and SoC verification effort. Clearly, this is a topic the industry must address, and some organizations have done just that. Those that have adopted an assertion-based verification (ABV) methodology have seen a significant reduction in simulation debugging time (as much as 50% [1,47]) due to improved observability. Furthermore, organizations that have embraced an ABV methodology are able to take advantage of more advanced verification techniques, such as formal property checking, thus improving their overall verification quality and results. This paper examines the application of ABV in today's electronic design industry to address specific challenges of poor observability and controllability during the verification process. Statistics illustrating successful application of both low-level and high-level assertions are presented. While the process of writing assertions is fairly well understood by those skilled in the art — the process of creating higher-level assertion-based IP that must communicate with other components in a contemporary transaction-level modeling (TLM) simulation environment, is not. Hence, this paper provides a set of steps (in a tutorial fashion) for creating assertion-based IP.","PeriodicalId":42137,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Electronic Design Automation","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87452596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this survey, we address the concept of network in three different contexts representing the deterministic, probabilistic, and statistical physics-inspired design paradigms. More precisely, we start by considering the natural representation of networks as graphs and discuss the main deterministic approaches to Network-on-Chip (NoC) design. Next, we introduce a probabilistic framework for network representation and optimization and present a few major approaches for NoC design proposed to date. Last but not least, we model the network as a thermodynamic system and discuss a statistical physics-based approach to characterize the network traffic. This formalism allows us to address the network concept in the most general context, point out the main limitations of the proposed solutions, and suggest a few open-ended problems.
{"title":"The Chip Is the Network: Toward a Science of Network-on-Chip Design","authors":"R. Marculescu, P. Bogdan","doi":"10.1561/1000000011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1000000011","url":null,"abstract":"In this survey, we address the concept of network in three different contexts representing the deterministic, probabilistic, and statistical physics-inspired design paradigms. More precisely, we start by considering the natural representation of networks as graphs and discuss the main deterministic approaches to Network-on-Chip (NoC) design. Next, we introduce a probabilistic framework for network representation and optimization and present a few major approaches for NoC design proposed to date. Last but not least, we model the network as a thermodynamic system and discuss a statistical physics-based approach to characterize the network traffic. This formalism allows us to address the network concept in the most general context, point out the main limitations of the proposed solutions, and suggest a few open-ended problems.","PeriodicalId":42137,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Electronic Design Automation","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73896032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have become one of the key digital circuit implementation media over the last decade. A crucial part of their creation lies in their architecture, which governs the nature of their programmable logic functionality and their programmable interconnect. FPGA architecture has a dramatic effect on the quality of the final device's speed performance, area efficiency, and power consumption. This survey reviews the historical development of programmable logic devices, the fundamental programming technologies that the programmability is built on, and then describes the basic understandings gleaned from research on architectures. We include a survey of the key elements of modern commercial FPGA architecture, and look toward future trends in the field.
{"title":"FPGA Architecture: Survey and Challenges","authors":"Ian Kuon, R. Tessier, Jonathan Rose","doi":"10.1561/1000000005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1000000005","url":null,"abstract":"Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have become one of the key digital circuit implementation media over the last decade. A crucial part of their creation lies in their architecture, which governs the nature of their programmable logic functionality and their programmable interconnect. FPGA architecture has a dramatic effect on the quality of the final device's speed performance, area efficiency, and power consumption. This survey reviews the historical development of programmable logic devices, the fundamental programming technologies that the programmability is built on, and then describes the basic understandings gleaned from research on architectures. We include a survey of the key elements of modern commercial FPGA architecture, and look toward future trends in the field.","PeriodicalId":42137,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Electronic Design Automation","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74165026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thermally Aware Design","authors":"Yong Zhan, Sanjay V. Kumar, S. Sapatnekar","doi":"10.1561/1000000007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1000000007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42137,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Electronic Design Automation","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74333345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A. Taubin, J. Cortadella, L. Lavagno, A. Kondratyev, A. Peeters
The number of gates on a chip is quickly growing toward and beyond the one billion mark. Keeping all the gates running at the beat of a single or a few rationally related clocks is becoming impossible. In static timing analysis process variations and signal integrity issues stretch the timing margins to the point where they become too conservative and result in significant overdesign. Importance and difficulty of such problems push some developers to once again turn to asynchronous alternatives. However, the electronics industry for the most part is still reluctant to adopt asynchronous design (with a few notable exceptions) due to a common belief that we still lack a commercial-quality Electronic Design Automation tools (similar to the synchronous RTL-to-GDSII flow) for asynchronous circuits. The purpose of this paper is to counteract this view by presenting design flows that can tackle large designs without significant changes with respect to synchronous design flow. We are limiting ourselves to four design flows that we believe to be closest to this goal. We start from the Tangram flow, because it is the most commercially proven and it is one of the oldest from a methodological point of view. The other three flows (Null Convention Logic, de-synchronization, and gate-level pipelining) could be considered together as asynchronous re-implementations of synchronous (RTL-or gate-level) specifications. The main common idea is substituting the global clocks by local synchronizations. Their most important aspect is to open the possibility to implement large legacy synchronous designs in an almost "push button" manner, where all asynchronous machinery is hidden, so that synchronous RTL designers do not need to be re-educated. These three flows offer a trade-off from very low overhead, almost synchronous implementations, to very high performance, extremely robust dual-rail pipelines.
{"title":"Design Automation of Real-Life Asynchronous Devices and Systems","authors":"A. Taubin, J. Cortadella, L. Lavagno, A. Kondratyev, A. Peeters","doi":"10.1561/1000000006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1000000006","url":null,"abstract":"The number of gates on a chip is quickly growing toward and beyond the one billion mark. Keeping all the gates running at the beat of a single or a few rationally related clocks is becoming impossible. In static timing analysis process variations and signal integrity issues stretch the timing margins to the point where they become too conservative and result in significant overdesign. Importance and difficulty of such problems push some developers to once again turn to asynchronous alternatives. \u0000 \u0000However, the electronics industry for the most part is still reluctant to adopt asynchronous design (with a few notable exceptions) due to a common belief that we still lack a commercial-quality Electronic Design Automation tools (similar to the synchronous RTL-to-GDSII flow) for asynchronous circuits. \u0000 \u0000The purpose of this paper is to counteract this view by presenting design flows that can tackle large designs without significant changes with respect to synchronous design flow. We are limiting ourselves to four design flows that we believe to be closest to this goal. We start from the Tangram flow, because it is the most commercially proven and it is one of the oldest from a methodological point of view. \u0000 \u0000The other three flows (Null Convention Logic, de-synchronization, and gate-level pipelining) could be considered together as asynchronous re-implementations of synchronous (RTL-or gate-level) specifications. The main common idea is substituting the global clocks by local synchronizations. Their most important aspect is to open the possibility to implement large legacy synchronous designs in an almost \"push button\" manner, where all asynchronous machinery is hidden, so that synchronous RTL designers do not need to be re-educated. These three flows offer a trade-off from very low overhead, almost synchronous implementations, to very high performance, extremely robust dual-rail pipelines.","PeriodicalId":42137,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Electronic Design Automation","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82655134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As IC technologies scale to finer feature sizes, it becomes increasingly difficult to control the relative process variations. The increasing fluctuations in manufacturing processes have introduced unavoidable and significant uncertainty in circuit performance; hence ensuring manufacturability has been identified as one of the top priorities of today's IC design problems. In this paper, we review various statistical methodologies that have been recently developed to model, analyze, and optimize performance variations at both transistor level and system level. The following topics will be discussed in detail: sources of process variations, variation characterization and modeling, Monte Carlo analysis, response surface modeling, statistical timing and leakage analysis, probability distribution extraction, parametric yield estimation and robust IC optimization. These techniques provide the necessary CAD infrastructure that facilitates the bold move from deterministic, corner-based IC design toward statistical and probabilistic design.
{"title":"Statistical Performance Modeling and Optimization","authors":"Xin Li, Jiayong Le, L. Pileggi","doi":"10.1561/1000000008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1000000008","url":null,"abstract":"As IC technologies scale to finer feature sizes, it becomes increasingly difficult to control the relative process variations. The increasing fluctuations in manufacturing processes have introduced unavoidable and significant uncertainty in circuit performance; hence ensuring manufacturability has been identified as one of the top priorities of today's IC design problems. In this paper, we review various statistical methodologies that have been recently developed to model, analyze, and optimize performance variations at both transistor level and system level. The following topics will be discussed in detail: sources of process variations, variation characterization and modeling, Monte Carlo analysis, response surface modeling, statistical timing and leakage analysis, probability distribution extraction, parametric yield estimation and robust IC optimization. These techniques provide the necessary CAD infrastructure that facilitates the bold move from deterministic, corner-based IC design toward statistical and probabilistic design.","PeriodicalId":42137,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Electronic Design Automation","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89325295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Design automation or computer-aided design (CAD) for field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has played a critical role in the rapid advancement and adoption of FPGA technology over the past two decades. The purpose of this paper is to meet the demand for an up-to-date comprehensive survey/tutorial for FPGA design automation, with an emphasis on the recent developments within the past 5-10 years. The paper focuses on the theory and techniques that have been, or most likely will be, reduced to practice. It covers all major steps in FPGA design flow which includes: routing and placement, circuit clustering, technology mapping and architecture-specific optimization, physical synthesis, RT-level and behavior-level synthesis, and power optimization. We hope that this paper can be used both as a guide for beginners who are embarking on research in this relatively young yet exciting area, and a useful reference for established researchers in this field.
{"title":"FPGA Design Automation: A Survey","authors":"Deming Chen, J. Cong, P. Pan","doi":"10.1561/1000000003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1000000003","url":null,"abstract":"Design automation or computer-aided design (CAD) for field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has played a critical role in the rapid advancement and adoption of FPGA technology over the past two decades. The purpose of this paper is to meet the demand for an up-to-date comprehensive survey/tutorial for FPGA design automation, with an emphasis on the recent developments within the past 5-10 years. The paper focuses on the theory and techniques that have been, or most likely will be, reduced to practice. It covers all major steps in FPGA design flow which includes: routing and placement, circuit clustering, technology mapping and architecture-specific optimization, physical synthesis, RT-level and behavior-level synthesis, and power optimization. We hope that this paper can be used both as a guide for beginners who are embarking on research in this relatively young yet exciting area, and a useful reference for established researchers in this field.","PeriodicalId":42137,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Electronic Design Automation","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77729211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
L. Carloni, R. Passerone, A. Pinto, A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli
The explosive growth of embedded electronics is bringing information and control systems of increasing complexity to every aspects of our lives. The most challenging designs are safety-critical systems, such as transportation systems (e.g., airplanes, cars, and trains), industrial plants and health care monitoring. The difficulties reside in accommodating constraints both on functionality and implementation. The correct behavior must be guaranteed under diverse states of the environment and potential failures; implementation has to meet cost, size, and power consumption requirements. The design is therefore subject to extensive mathematical analysis and simulation. However, traditional models of information systems do not interface well to the continuous evolving nature of the environment in which these devices operate. Thus, in practice, different mathematical representations have to be mixed to analyze the overall behavior of the system. Hybrid systems are a particular class of mixed models that focus on the combination of discrete and continuous subsystems. There is a wealth of tools and languages that have been proposed over the years to handle hybrid systems. However, each tool makes different assumptions on the environment, resulting in somewhat different notions of hybrid system. This makes it difficult to share information among tools. Thus, the community cannot maximally leverage the substantial amount of work that has been directed to this important topic. In this paper, we review and compare hybrid system tools by highlighting their differences in terms of their underlying semantics, expressive power and mathematical mechanisms. We conclude our review with a comparative summary, which suggests the need for a unifying approach to hybrid systems design. As a step in this direction, we make the case for a semantic-aware interchange format, which would enable the use of joint techniques, make a formal comparison between different approaches possible, and facilitate exporting and importing design representations.
{"title":"Languages and Tools for Hybrid Systems Design","authors":"L. Carloni, R. Passerone, A. Pinto, A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli","doi":"10.1561/1000000001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1561/1000000001","url":null,"abstract":"The explosive growth of embedded electronics is bringing information and control systems of increasing complexity to every aspects of our lives. The most challenging designs are safety-critical systems, such as transportation systems (e.g., airplanes, cars, and trains), industrial plants and health care monitoring. The difficulties reside in accommodating constraints both on functionality and implementation. The correct behavior must be guaranteed under diverse states of the environment and potential failures; implementation has to meet cost, size, and power consumption requirements. The design is therefore subject to extensive mathematical analysis and simulation. However, traditional models of information systems do not interface well to the continuous evolving nature of the environment in which these devices operate. Thus, in practice, different mathematical representations have to be mixed to analyze the overall behavior of the system. Hybrid systems are a particular class of mixed models that focus on the combination of discrete and continuous subsystems. There is a wealth of tools and languages that have been proposed over the years to handle hybrid systems. However, each tool makes different assumptions on the environment, resulting in somewhat different notions of hybrid system. This makes it difficult to share information among tools. Thus, the community cannot maximally leverage the substantial amount of work that has been directed to this important topic. In this paper, we review and compare hybrid system tools by highlighting their differences in terms of their underlying semantics, expressive power and mathematical mechanisms. We conclude our review with a comparative summary, which suggests the need for a unifying approach to hybrid systems design. As a step in this direction, we make the case for a semantic-aware interchange format, which would enable the use of joint techniques, make a formal comparison between different approaches possible, and facilitate exporting and importing design representations.","PeriodicalId":42137,"journal":{"name":"Foundations and Trends in Electronic Design Automation","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80734177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}