Posts Tagged ‘SoC’
Monday, May 4th, 2020
 These days verification teams no longer question whether hardware assisted verification should be used in their projects. Rather, they ask at which stage they should start using it.
Contemporary System-on-Chip (SoC) designs are already sufficiently complex to make HDL simulation a bottleneck during verification, without even mentioning hardware-software co-verification or firmware and software testing. Thus, IC design emulation is an increasingly popular technique of verification with hardware-in-the-loop.
Recently, hardware assisted verification became much more affordable thanks to the availability of high capacity FPGAs (like Xilinx Virtex UltraScale US440) and their adoption for emulation by EDA vendors.
A good example of such an emulation platform is Aldec’s HES-DVM. It can accommodate designs over 300 Million ASIC gates on multi-FPGA boards (HES-US-1320), where the capacity scales by interconnecting multiple boards in a backplane.
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Tags: ARM, asic, embedded, Emulation, FPGA, HES-DVM, simulation, SoC, verification
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Wednesday, February 19th, 2020
Have you ever worked on a group project where you had to combine your work with that of a colleague of a different engineering discipline but the absence of an efficient means of doing so affected the project’s overall outcome? Well, for software and hardware engineers developing an SoC, the merging of their respective engineering efforts for verification purposes is a big challenge.
Early access to hardware-software co-verification allows hardware and software teams to work concurrently and set the foundation to a successful SoC project. However, many co-emulation methodologies are based on processor virtual models which are not accurate representations of the design. Fortunately, Aldec has a solution that integrates an ARM-based SoC from Xilinx, specifically a Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, with the largest Xilinx UltraScale FPGA. Since the Zynq device includes the hard IP of the ARM processor, our solution provides an accurate representation of the ARM-based SoC design for co-verification.
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Tags: ARM, asic, embedded, Emulation, FPGA, HES-DVM, SoC, SoC and ASIC Prototyping, Validation, verification, Zynq
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Thursday, January 25th, 2018
 A high-performance router is an absolute must if you want to run a high-traffic network in which different devices need to transfer and receive data as fast as possible. A router with a powerful processor and sufficient local memory reduces data hiccups and minimizes message loading and buffering times. But is that enough?
Because of the huge amount of data that people now generate – combined with the wealth of communication protocols, such as Wi-Fi, Ethernet, USB, SFP, QSFP – high-performance, hardware re-programmable routers are becoming popular. That hardware re-programmability is being delivered through FPGAs, and utilizing one as the main ‘processor’ on the router makes it easy to add or modify desired modules such as encryption and compression.
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Tags: acceleration, design, digital, embedded, Emulation, FPGA, hardware, industrial, prototyping, SoC, SoC and ASIC Prototyping, Xilinx
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Monday, December 11th, 2017
Modern ASIC and SoC designs have increased in complexity such that multiple FPGAs of the largest capacity are now required to prototype the entire functionality of the design. As design sizes increase, more and more FPGAs are required. The capacity and pin limitations of FPGAs create constraints for how the ASIC/SoC design can be mapped into the FPGAs. Aldec’s HES-DVM’s prototyping mode accounts for the limitations of the target FPGAs and allows the user to map a design to the FPGAs within these constraints.
Partitioning a design to fit into multiple FPGAs can be a lot of work
Designing the partitions with HES-DVM is as easy as selecting specific VHDL/SystemVerilog design modules from the hierarchy and moving them to a desired partition. All information about the design modules and the amount of LUTs, Flip-flops, memory blocks, DSP slices, and I/O consumed are displayed for convenience. These values can also be viewed as a percentage of the target FPGAs’ available resources allowing you to know when an FPGA is full.
Adding a module to a partition
Mapping a partition to an FPGA
Once the partitions are finalized, each partition can be assigned to a specific FPGA. A design successfully fitting into the FPGAs on the target prototyping board is only the beginning. There still remains a big problem with the sheer number of connections between the partitions. Modern designs have thousands of internal signals interconnecting major blocks or sub-systems. It’s likely that there won’t be a sufficient amount of direct connections between FPGAs to support the design’s internal wiring. How can the large amount of internal design signals possibly be accommodated by the relatively smaller amount of I/O available from the FPGAs?
For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog.
Tags: asic, FPGA, HES-7, HES-DVM, prototyping, SoC, SoC and ASIC Prototyping
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Tuesday, October 17th, 2017
 Creativity and innovation, which lead the society to success, rest on the foundational institutions such as schools and universities. They provide fertile soil to seed, grow and flourish enterprises. To harvest more within an industry, the ecosystem needs to be enriched where the seeds are grown. Considering that the university’s courses are the nutrition to student, they need to be designed in a productive manner as they will provide the next generation of engineers. By providing the necessary platform in addition to the rich and informative tutorials, the quality of the input information for students would be assured. Particularly in the field of Electrical and Computer Engineering, it is important that students get as much hands on experience as possible, and tackle design challenges – such as HW/SW co-design and co-verification – before entering the job market; for their own benefit as well as the industry as a whole.
In this blog, you will become familiar with the TySOM Education kit (TySOM EDU) package designed for the university courses related to hardware design and embedded system design researches.
The TySOM EDU contains a TySOM embedded development board, Riviera-PRO advanced hardware simulator and informative tutorials and reference designs. Although it is possible to choose any development board from the TySOM embedded development board family, the TySOM-1A-7Z010 would be the most cost-effective solution for most university projects.
TySOM-1A-7Z010 (ZynqTM) is a ready-to-use and feature-rich embedded development board which provides the required peripherals to tackle both basic and advanced Zynq-based projects. The XC7Z010 is based on the Xilinx® All Programmable System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture, which integrates a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with Xilinx 7-series Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) logic. Coupling the device to a rich set of peripherals for connectivity, communication and multimedia, makes this board ideal for university projects requiring HW/SW co-design. For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog.
Tags: co-simulation, design, digital, embedded, FPGA, HDL, prototyping, Riviera-PRO, simulation, SoC, university, Xilinx
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Thursday, September 14th, 2017
 Imagine traveling back in the time to the early human ages. It’s going to be both scary and interesting when you meet a person who probably cannot speak or if they do you won’t be able to understand them. Clearly, communication will not be possible until you find a mutual way to convey your respective meanings/intentions. The same principle applies in the world of electronics as there are various types of interfaces among electronic devices. Therefore, a standard communication protocol eases the transformation of data in a system, especially in a System-on-Chip (SoC) system which consists of different systems.
SoC FPGAs such as Xilinx® Zynq™ establishes the ARM Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) as the on-chip interconnection standard to connect and manage the functional blocks within the SoC design. The Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI) is designed for FPGAs based on AMBA as a protocol for communication between blocks of IP.
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Tags: Accelerator coherency port, ARM, AXI interconnection, AXI Lite, AXI memory map, AXI stream, embedded, FPGA, General purpose interface, High Performance interface, SoC, TySOM, Xilinx, Zynq
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Monday, April 10th, 2017
 Most everyone would agree how important FPGA prototyping is to test and validate an IP, sub-system, or a complete SoC design. Before the design is taped-out it can be validated at speeds near real operating conditions with physical peripherals and devices connected to it instead of simulation models. At the same time, these designs are not purely hardware, but these days incorporate a significant amount of the software stack and so co-verification of hardware and software is put at high importance among other requirements in the verification plan.
However, preparing a robust FPGA prototype is not a trivial task. It requires strong hardware skills and spending a lot of time in the lab to configure and interconnect all required peripheral devices with an FPGA base board. Even more difficult is to create a comprehensive test scenario which contains procedures to configure various peripherals. Programming hundreds of registers in proper sequence and then reacting on events, interrupts, and checking status registers is a complex process. The task which is straightforward during simulation, where full control over design is assured, becomes extremely hard to implement in an FPGA prototype. Facing this challenge, verification engineers often connect a microprocessor or microcontroller daughter card to the main FPGA board. The IP or SoC subsystem you are designing will be connected with some kind of CPU anyhow, so this way seems natural. Having a CPU connected to the design implemented in an FPGA facilitates creating programmatically reconfigurable test scenarios and enables test automation. Moreover, the work of software developers can be now reused as the software stack with device drivers can become a part of the initialization procedure in the hardware test.. The software can become a part of the initialization procedure in the hardware test. If that makes sense to you, then why not use an FPGA board that has all you need – both FPGA and the CPU?
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Tags: Active-HDL, ARM, asic, co-simulation, design, FPGA, fpga prototyping solution, hardware, prototyping, SoC, SoC and ASIC Prototyping, soc design, Xilinx
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Wednesday, November 6th, 2013
 The recent ARM® TechCon Conference in Santa Clara was definitely the front-runner of my favorite conferences that I attended this year. Fun, informative and filled with software engineers, physical designers, design verification teams, and hardware engineers – ARM TechCon was the place to be to learn about the latest innovations from the embedded industry. Aldec was there showcasing our HES-DVM™ and HES-7™ platforms, which enable engineers to utilize emulation and FPGA-based prototyping to verify the latest ARM designs.
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Tags: Aldec, ARM, arm processors, arm techcon conference, arm-based processors, co-simulation, dual-core arm cortex-A9 processors, Emulation, hes-7 platforms, hes-7 soc db, HES-DVM, hw/sw verification platform, ICE, In-circuit emulation, prototyping, rtl simulation, SoC, SoC and ASIC Prototyping, Xilinx, xilinx zynq soc
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Friday, October 18th, 2013
 The University of California, Irvine (UCI) is popular for many things, but I recall during my school days that it was distinctly known among students for its underground tunnel network. The official story is that they were simply built to house heating and cooling pipes. Yet, the rumor persists that this complex maze of underground tunnels was constructed decades ago to provide safe passage for faculty members in case of student riots.
I’ll admit I would love to uncover these tunnels someday, unfortunately they have long been sealed off from curiosity seekers. I will, however, be at the UCI campus next week unraveling a different sort of maze for engineers attending the annual International SoC Conference. Aldec is once again a Platinum Sponsor for this popular academic conference, and this year I will be joined by NEC Corporation’s Dr. Wakabayashi to present a technical session:
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Tags: asic prototyping, high level synthesis, prototyping, SoC, SoC and ASIC Prototyping, Validation, verification
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Wednesday, October 9th, 2013
In the last SCE-MI article, we discussed how SCE-MI macro-based infrastructures can speedup SoC design verification time. In SCE-MI 2.1, Accelera introduced a ‘function-based’ infrastructure which is based on SystemVerilog DPI functionality. The SystemVerilog DPI is an interface which can be used to connect SystemVerilog files with foreign languages (C, C++, SystemC, etc).
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Tags: accelera, Aldec, Emulation, function-based infrastructure, HES-DVM, macro-based sce-miI, sce-mi macro-based infrastructures, SoC, soc design verification time, systemc, systemverilog, systemverilog dpi functionality, verification
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These days verification teams no longer question whether hardware assisted verification should be used in their projects. Rather, they ask at which stage they should start using it.
