In VLSI semiconductor manufacturing, the process of Design Closure is a part of the development workflow by which an integrated circuit design is modified from its initial description to meet a growing list of design constraints and objectives. The goal of HLS is to let hardware designers efficiently build and verify hardware, by giving them better control over optimization of their design architecture, and through the nature of allowing the designer to describe the design at a higher level of abstraction while the tool does the RTL implementation. Formal equivalence checking: | |Formal equivalence checking| process is a part of |electronic design automation| (EDA), ... World Heritage Encyclopedia, the aggregation of the largest online encyclopedias available, and the most definitive collection ever assembled. In everyday terms, functional verification attempts to answer the question "Does this proposed design do what is intended?" checking if two well-defined programs that take N inputs and produce M outputs are equivalent: Conceptually, you can turn software into a state machine (that's what the combination of a compiler does, since a computer plus its memory form a very large state machine.) Computers, mobile phones, and other digital home appliances are now inextricable parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the small size and low cost of ICs. A synchronous circuit is a digital circuit in which the changes in the state of memory elements are synchronized by a clock signal. The tools work together in a design flow that chip designers use to design and analyze entire semiconductor chips. The first part of the book reviews the design problems that require logic equivalence checking and describes the underlying technologies that are used to … In computer science, a binary decision diagram (BDD) or branching program is a data structure that is used to represent a Boolean function. Bugs, or defects, can include issues like missing features, errors in design, etc. The current version is IEEE standard 1800-2017. On a more abstract level, BDDs can be considered as a compressed representation of sets or relations. However, the previously proposed formal equivalence checking approaches cannot handle designs if the mapping information is not given beforehand. There are two basic technologies used for boolean reasoning in equivalence checking programs: Major products in the Logic Equivalence Checking (LEC) area of EDA are: Digital electronics or digital (electronic) circuits are electronics that operate on digital signals. For example, the time delay along a path from the output of a D-Flip Flop, through combinatorial logic gates, then into the next D-Flip Flop input must satisfy the time period between synchronizing clock pulses to the two flip flops. In contrast, analog circuits manipulate analog signals whose performance is more subject to manufacturing tolerance, signal attenuation and noise. A synonym used at IBM is RIT. This process is called formal equivalence checking and is a problem that is studied under the broader area of formal verification. The code is analyzed, architecturally constrained, and scheduled to transcompile into a register-transfer level (RTL) design in a hardware description language (HDL), which is in turn commonly synthesized to the gate level by the use of a logic synthesis tool. For high-level synthesis, HLV is to HLS as functional verification is to logic synthesis. Logic synthesis is one aspect of electronic design automation. Logical equivalence is different from material equivalence, although the two concepts are closely related. Typically, the abstract graph is represented as a data structure in software. The logical equivalence of and is sometimes expressed as , , or . In a sequential digital logic circuit, data is stored in memory devices called flip-flops or latches. About Sini Balakrishnan. The Conformal EC-XL configuration provides formal equivalence checking for digital logic, including complex arithmetic logic and datapaths. ICs are now used in virtually all electronic equipment and have revolutionized the world of electronics. By using a methodology like UVM, OVM, or VMM, the verification team develops a reusable environment. Microprocessors operate on numbers and symbols represented in the binary number system. She is an expert on Formal Verification and has written international papers and articles on related topics. Verification of the RTL is an important part of the process. clock-level timing. Formal equivalence checking. These facilities enable a designer to simulate concurrent processes, each described using plain C++ syntax. For simple circuits the design process can often be done by one person without needing a planned or structured design process, but for more complex designs, teams of designers following a systematic approach with intelligently guided computer simulation are becoming increasingly common. In electronic design automation, functional verification is the task of verifying that the logic design conforms to specification. This geometric representation is called integrated circuit layout. The initial netlist will usually undergo a number of transformations such as optimization, addition of Design For Test (DFT) structures, etc., before it is used as the basis for the placement of the logic elements into a physical layout. Nowadays, UVM is more popular than others. VHDL can also be used as a general purpose parallel programming language. In practice, programs have bugs and it would be a major risk to assume that all steps from RTL through the final tape-out netlist have been performed without error. In computer engineering, a hardware description language (HDL) is a specialized computer language used to describe the structure and behavior of electronic circuits, and most commonly, digital logic circuits. Typically, one has hardware or software systems in mind, whereas the specification contains safety requirements such as the absence of deadlocks and similar critical states that can cause the system to crash. In simple cases, the user can compute the path delay between elements manually. Equivalence is not to be confused with functional correctness, which must be determined by functional verification.