Aldec Design and Verification Henry Chan
Henry provides support and guidance to Aldec customers as an Applications Engineer. Specializing in Active-HDL™ and Riviera-PRO™, he is well versed in Aldec’s industry leading FPGA design and simulation tools. His diverse knowledge from hardware description languages to functional … More » SystemVerilog Functional Coverage in a NutshellMarch 15th, 2018 by Henry Chan
Let’s say you have a block you need to verify. How do you know that the stimulus you are about to use is exhaustive enough and that you have covered the necessary scenarios/situations to prove it is working correctly? This is where functional coverage comes in. SystemVerilog’s functional coverage constructs allow you to quantify the completeness of your stimulus by recording the values that have occurred on your signals. Consider an 8-bit address signal, paddr, and a 32-bit data signal, pwdata. Assigning a coverpoint to each signal will direct your simulator to track these signals during simulation and record the number of hits. For each coverpoint, bins can be created to organize the possible signal values into meaningful categories. Finally, a covergroup is used to encapsulate it all and is instantiated using the new() constructor. Associating the covergroup with a clock event is also a good way to trigger the coverage sampling. Read the rest of SystemVerilog Functional Coverage in a Nutshell Understanding the inner workings of UVM – Part 2January 29th, 2018 by Vatsal Choksi
In this blog, my major focus is on explaining the concepts such as Sequence, Sequencer, Driver and showing how the communication takes place from sequence to sequencer and from sequencer to driver. In the previous blog, I included a top-level diagram of the UVM structure, showing different base classes. If you need refresh your memory on where the classes Sequence, Sequencer and Drivers stand please click https://www.aldec.com/en/company/blog/149–understanding-the-inner-workings-of-uvm. So, let’s look at the main concepts and follow the communication mechanism they use for the effective execution of a test. Partition your Design for FPGA PrototypingDecember 11th, 2017 by Henry Chan
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. Plots: A New Way To Analyze DataNovember 29th, 2017 by Sunil Sahoo
Data analysis is often a very time consuming process for a hardware design or verification engineer. We always end up using the waveform viewer which may not be very efficient in giving us a high-level overview of what we’re looking for. Data that is spread across a long simulation cycle is very hard to visualize on the waveform. Whenever I have to analyze a huge chunk of data, I always wonder what would be the best way to do it. It is often cumbersome to go through even a millisecond’s worth of waveform data to analyze the bigger picture. There are of course other tools that can take a VCD file and perform an analysis but that involves buying and learning to use an additional tool. Sometimes it’s not feasible to invest time and money into new tools. So we always go back to our trusty waveform viewer to make sense of the results. But what if there is a better way of analyzing such data, especially if you are doing some kind of signal processing application and have a lot of data that you would rather view in a format other than the time domain based representation of a waveform? For example, imagine you are trying to visualize the data of an FFT engine. On a waveform, it is next to impossible to visualize this. In Riviera-PRO we have the Plots feature which can help you. The plot window ties directly to the simulation database, so you don’t have to code anything new or learn a new tool. Just with a few clicks you can add objects to the plot viewer and, based on the settings, it will generate a plot of that object. Sounds very simple but it gives you a bigger picture of what your design object is doing over the course of the entire simulation, rather than just the slice you can see on the waveform between two points of time. For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog. Emulation in FPGANovember 22nd, 2017 by Krzysztof Szczur
For many years, emulators were available only to verification teams working on the largest projects in companies with deep enough pockets. Due to size rather than capabilities they were called “Big Box” emulators and typically were used in order to recover some of the time lost on RTL simulation. Meanwhile, FPGA technology has been available long enough to mature to the point where FPGA based emulation became available – and I’m not talking here about FPGA prototyping. “Emulation – Prototyping, aren’t they just synonyms?” Sure, they are not. The most significant differences between FPGA usage in prototypes and in emulation are shown in table 1.
Table 1: Typical differences between FPGA usage in prototyping and emulation FPGAs are the fastest platform for prototyping, but we can also harness that speed into our verification environment, then we can achieve runtime performance 2x to 5x faster than traditional “big box” emulation systems, and all at a fraction of the cost per gate per MHz. “FPGAs are way too small for our SoC design, aren’t they?” In the HES-US-2640 board, Aldec already has the largest capacity single FPGA boards commercially available today. Connecting 4 such boards in a backplane gives you 24 largest Xilinx UltraScale chips in which you can implement 633 Million ASIC Gates and still have 40% of capacity margin to facilitate FPGA Place & Route. Figure 1: Scalable HES platform for prototyping & emulation Not all designs need such excessive capacity, especially IoT projects, where the primary requirement is small footprint and energy-safe design. You will find the proper configuration in Aldec HES boards versatile portfolio containing Virtex-7, Virtex UltraScale and Kintex UltraScale based hardware. For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog. Code Coverage in HDL Editor? Now That’s a Nice Feature.October 18th, 2017 by Sunil Sahoo
For a long time I have been a fan of code coverage tools that are embedded into the simulators themselves, and which give you the ability to switch easily between the code and the coverage results. It is particularly helpful to have a way of navigating the hierarchy, selecting a coverage result and then being able to look into the source code and make changes. I recently had occasion to explain to someone how the feature works in Aldec’s Riviera-PRO, and to reflect on the tool developments that led to this great capability. As you may be aware, Aldec has a number of legacy coverage tools that allow you to view the coverage results from within the simulator; and which give you easy access to the coverage results and the corresponding lines of code. With the introduction of our unified coverage database – in .acdb format – it became possible to see the code coverage results in a more flexible format. The biggest boost, in my opinion, was the introduction of a cross-probing capability. For those of you who are wondering how to use this feature.
For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog. Synthesis of Energy-Efficient FSMs Implemented in PLD CircuitsSeptember 26th, 2017 by Radek Nawrot
Well, summer has been and gone; and for most of us it was a time to relax and reflect on our working practices. What can we do to achieve better results? And what can we do to break out of the routine of working on so many revisions? For me, one of my summer break ponderings was thinking back on a trick I learned while working with my colleagues at the Silesian University of Technology. CMOS technology is the one that has dominated all applications of digital circuits. Power consumed by a CMOS digital circuit is the sum of two components: static power and dynamic power. The static power is a characteristic feature of the technology process used, and is associated with leakage currents in steady state. The dynamic power consumed by a CMOS gate is proportional to average switching activity at the output of the gate, which describes how often the state at the gate output is changing. The dynamic power component can thus be considered and minimized in the appropriate process of logic synthesis. The essence of logic synthesis oriented toward energy-efficiency requires finding a circuit structure in which the number of state transitions is minimized. Switching global clock networks are responsible for a significant part of the total power dissipated by a CMOS VLSI circuit. That’s why many engineers try to block the clock signal to achieve power reductions in synchronous circuits. Programmable Logic Devices (PLDs), and especially Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), constitute a relatively new and rapidly developing branch of digital electronics. Constantly growing logic capacities at moderate prices make PLDs an attractive platform for not only prototyping but also short- and medium-volume production. It is not always obvious though how best to map logic structures (resources) within a given PLD architecture when designing with energy-efficiency in mind. In particular, implementing clock gating is difficult, as PLD circuits contain dedicated clock networks, which do not contain any gating elements. “Disabling” the clock signal in PLD structures can be accomplished in two ways: firstly, by utilizing the “Enable Clock” inputs of memory elements or, secondly, by distributing the clock signal using local clock lines or general-purpose routing resources (which enable the insertion of logic gates). For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog. |