Concepts, limitations of traditional ASIC design
Extensible processors as an alternative to RTL
Toward multiple-processor SoCs
Processors and disruptive technology
Conclusions
System on Chip is a an IC that integrates all the components of an electronic system. This presentation is based on the current trends and challenges in the IP based SOC design.
OLA Conf 2002 - OLA in SoC Design Environment - paperTim55Ehrler
The integration of Open Library Architecture (OLA) libraries within nano-technology design environments can positively impact SoC design cycle times. Consistent calculation of desired information across a standard application programming interface (API) ensures analysis convergence among tools, eliminates data exchange processing and storage requirements, and significantly reduces iterations through design processes steps.
System on Chip is a an IC that integrates all the components of an electronic system. This presentation is based on the current trends and challenges in the IP based SOC design.
OLA Conf 2002 - OLA in SoC Design Environment - paperTim55Ehrler
The integration of Open Library Architecture (OLA) libraries within nano-technology design environments can positively impact SoC design cycle times. Consistent calculation of desired information across a standard application programming interface (API) ensures analysis convergence among tools, eliminates data exchange processing and storage requirements, and significantly reduces iterations through design processes steps.
System on Chip (SoC) for mobile phonesJeffrey Funk
These slides use concepts (e.g., scaling) from my (Jeff Funk) course entitled analyzing hi-tech opportunities to look at how reductions in the feature sizes for integrated circuits (ICs) are enabling increases in the functionality of IC chips and thus the placements of larger systems on them. In turn, these increases in functionality of ICs are enabling increases in the functionality of mobile phones while at the same time creating new challenges for IC and mobile phone suppliers.
System on Chip (SoC) for mobile phonesJeffrey Funk
These slides use concepts (e.g., scaling) from my (Jeff Funk) course entitled analyzing hi-tech opportunities to look at how reductions in the feature sizes for integrated circuits (ICs) are enabling increases in the functionality of IC chips and thus the placements of larger systems on them. In turn, these increases in functionality of ICs are enabling increases in the functionality of mobile phones while at the same time creating new challenges for IC and mobile phone suppliers.
In the world of Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI), the Physical Design process plays a crucial role in transforming a logical design into a physical layout that can be manufactured. Among the various steps involved in the Physical Design flow, Place and Route (PnR) stand out as a critical phase. PnR consists in placing the different components of a design on a chip and routing the connections between them. In this article, we will delve into the PnR flow, exploring its key steps, challenges, and the tools involved.
1. Partitioning:
Partitioning is a preliminary step in the PnR flow that divides the design into manageable blocks or modules based on functionality, hierarchy, or timing constraints. It enables parallel processing during subsequent steps and facilitates easier placement and routing. Partitioning algorithms aim to balance the workload across partitions and minimize inter-partition communication.
2. Floorplanning:
Floorplanning is a critical aspect of the placement process, defining the overall chip's top-level structure and organizing the different functional blocks. It involves allocating space for each block, determining their relative positions, and defining the placement regions. Effective floorplanning ensures proper utilization of available chip areas, reduces congestion, and facilitates efficient routing.
3. Power Planning:
Power planning focuses on distributing power supply and ensuring a stable power delivery network throughout the chip. It involves inserting power distribution networks, decoupling capacitors, and voltage regulators to minimize voltage drop, signal noise, and power supply fluctuations. Power planning techniques aim to optimize power grid layout, reduce IR drop, and mitigate electromigration issues.
4. Placement:
Placement is the first step in the PnR flow and involves determining the optimal location for each logic component on the chip. The primary objective of placement is to minimize wire length, power consumption, and timing delays while adhering to various constraints such as blockages, power grid, and signal integrity.
5. Clock Tree Synthesis (CTS):
Clock Tree Synthesis is a crucial step in PnR flow that ensures the efficient distribution of clock signals to all sequential elements of the design. CTS aims to minimize clock skew, and power dissipation, and provide a balanced clock network. CTS algorithms construct a tree-like structure by inserting buffers and optimizing wire length to achieve reliable clock distribution.
6. Routing:
6.1 Global Routing:
Once the placement is complete, the next step is global routing, which establishes the connections between the placed components. Global routing generates a coarse routing structure using minimum spanning trees, maze routing, or other algorithms. It focuses on achieving reasonable wirelength and reducing congestion without considering the precise details of the interconnects.
Evaluating UCIe based multi-die SoC to meet timing and power Deepak Shankar
Multi-die designs allow systems engineering to pack more functionality with different timing and power constraints into a single package. Older generation multi-die split the dies into high-speed and low speed. Newer, high-performance multi-die System-on-Chip (SoC) requires interaction between memories across the die-to-die interfaces. Connections between dies must be power efficient, have low latency, provide high bandwidth to transfer massive amounts of data, and deliver error-free operation. The distribution of cores, deep neural networks and AI engines across these dies makes it extremely hard to predict the expected end-to-end latency, power spikes and effective bandwidth. Moreover, Multi-die architectures have evolved from proprietary to industry standard UCIe.
This Webinar looks at the system-wide view of performance and power in a multi-die SOC. We will be showcasing a few use cases that combines various types of processing engines across PCIe and interconnected UCIe. This modeling effort will present the user with different system performance and system architecture models and a guide on how to best bring different aspects of their design together in a holistic way that is optimized for power, timing and functionality.
During the Webinar, users can follow along using VisualSim Cloud. To get started with VisualSim Cloud, users can register and receive a login at https://www.mirabilisdesign.com/visualsim-cloud-login/. Once you receive the login, follow the instructions, and open the models provided in the Template pull-down. More instructions will be provided at the start of the Webinar.
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
2. OUTLINE
• Introduction
• The limitations of traditional ASIC design
• Extensible processors as an alternative to RTL
• Toward multiple-processor SoCs
• Processors and disruptive technology
• Conclusions
3. Introduction
• The rapid evolution of silicon technology is bringing a new crisis to
system-on-chip (SoC) design.
• One way to speed up the development of mega-gate SoCs is the use of
multiple microprocessor cores to perform much of the processing currently
relegated to RTL.
• A few characteristics of typical deep-sub-micron integrated circuit (IC)
design illustrate the challenges facing SoC design teams:
In a generic, 130-nm standard-cell foundry process, silicon density routinely exceeds
100K usable gates per mm2.
In the past, silicon capacity and design-automation tools limited the practical size of a
block of RTL to smaller than 100-K gates.
4. The design complexity of a typical logic block grows much more rapidly than does its
gate count, and system complexity increases much more rapidly than the number of
constituent blocks.
The cost of a design bug is going up. Much is made of the rising cost of deepsub-micron
IC masks—the cost of a full 130-nm mask set is approaching $1M, and 90-nm masks
may reach $2M.
All embedded systems now contain significant amounts of software.
Standard communication protocols are growing rapidly in complexity.
• In most markets, competitive forces drive the ever-increasing need to
embrace new technologies.
• Just one CMOS process step, say from 180 to 130nm roughly doubles the
available number of gates for a given die size and cost.
• The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors forecasts a
slight slowing in the pace of density increases, but exponential capacity
increases are expected to continue for at least the next decade, as shown in
Figure.
5. • The trend toward the use of large
numbers of RTL-based logic blocks
and the mixing together of control
processors and digital signal
processors on the same chip is
illustrated in Figure.
6. • This ceaseless growth in IC
complexity is a central dilemma for
SoC design.
• Unfortunately, general purpose
processors fall far short of the mark
with respect to application
throughput,cost, and power
efficiency for the most
computationally demanding
problems.
• designing custom RTL logic for
these new, complex functions or
emerging standards takes too long
and produces designs that are too
rigid to change easily.
• A closer look at the makeup of the
typical RTL block in Figure gives
insights into this paradox.
7. • In most RTL designs, the datapath consumes the vast majority of the gates
in the logic block.
• For example, a packet-processing block will probably employ a datapath
that closely corresponds to the packet header’s structure.
• This state machine may consume only a few percent of the block’s gate
count, but it embodies most of the design and verification risk due to its
complexity.
• One way to understand the risks associated with hardware state machines is
• to examine the combinatorial complexity of verification.
• A state machine with N states and I inputs may have as many as N2 next-
state equations, and each of these equations will be some function of the I
inputs, or 2I possible input combinations. Taken together, at least N2*2I
input combinations must be tried to test all the state transitions of this state
machine exhaustively.
• Configurable, extensible processors—a fundamentally new form of
microprocessor-provide a way of reducing the risk of state-machine design
by replacing hard-to-design, hard-to-verify state-machine logic blocks with
pre-designed, pre-verified processor cores and application firmware.
8. THE LIMITATIONS OF
TRADITIONAL ASIC DESIGN
• New chips are characterized by rapidly increasing logic complexity.
Moore’s-lawscaling of silicon density makes multi-million-gate designs
feasible.
• New chips are characterized by rapidly increasing logic complexity.
Moore’s-lawscaling of silicon density makes multi-million-gate designs
feasible.
• When requirements change,however, especially when new modes and
features must be added, RTL-level designs may not scale well, particularly
if the original design and verification team is not available to do the
redesign.
9. • The conventional SoC-design model closely follows the tradition of its
predecessor: combining a standard microprocessor, standard memory, and
RTL-builtlogic into an application-specific instruction set processor
(ASIC).
• Most commonly, the processors used for these board-level designs are
generalpurpose reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors
originally designed in the 1980s for general-purpose UNIX desktops and
servers.
• When all system components are combined on a single piece of silicon,
clock frequency increases and power dissipation decreases relative to the
equivalent board-level design.
• SoC architectures that are cloned from board-level designs are often
organized around one or two 32-bit busses (often a fast memory bus, plus a
slow peripheral bus) because this approach saves pins—an expensive
commodity in a board-level design but much less relevant to an SoC’s
potential onchip connections.
10. The Impact of SoC Integration
• Ironically, bus bottlenecks commonly disappear in SoC designs.
• Wide busses are efficient and appropriate to use between adjoining SoC
logic blocks. The communications bandwidth between a processor and
surrounding logic can exceed 1GB per second on an SoC using these wider
busses.
• Although few practical SoC designs will even approach this limit, wide
onchip busses create tremendous architectural headroom and invite a new,
more effective approach to system architecture.
11. The Limitations of General-Purpose
Processors
• The traditional approach to SoC design is further constrained by the origins
and evolution of microprocessors.
• These processors were designed to serve general-purpose applications and
were structured for implementation as stand-alone integrated circuits.
• The general-purpose nature of these processors makes them well suited to
the extremely diverse mix of applications run on computer systems.
• Even the most silicon-intensive, deeply pipelined, super-scalar, general-
purpose processors can rarely sustain much more than two instructions per
cycle (IPC), and the harder processor designers push against this IPC limit,
the higher the cost and power per unit of useful performance extracted from
the microprocessor architecture.
• A digital camera may perform a variety of complex image processing but it
never executes standard query language (SQL) database queries.
12. • The specialized nature of individual embedded applications creates two
issues for general-purpose processors in data-intensive embedded
applications.
• First, there is a poor match between the critical functions of many
embedded applications (e.g., image, audio, protocol processing) and a
RISC processor’s basic integer instruction set and register file.
• Second, the more focused embedded devices cannot take full advantage of
all of a general-purpose processor’s broad capabilities.
• Instead, designers have traditionally turned to hard-wired circuits to
perform these data-intensive functions such as image manipulation,
protocol processing, signal compression, encryption, and so on.
13. DSP as Application-Specific Processor
• DSPs are often used in tandem with RISC controllers on SoCs, especially when
the end application calls for a mix of control and signal processing.
• The emergence of complex very long instruction word (VLIW) DSPs such as
Texas Instruments C6000 family and the StarCore architecture reflect this
“quest for generality.”
• In many cases a programmable DSP would be attractive, but only if it could be
sufficiently fast in the application to rival RTL performance.
• In the past 10 years, the wide availability of logic synthesis and ASIC design
tools has made RTL design the standard for hardware developers.
• Because they are not attempts to solve application-arbitrary sequential
problems, RTL designs avoid the general-purpose, single-processor
performance bottlenecks.
14. Extensible processors as an alternative
to RTL
• Hardwired RTL design has many attractive characteristics: small area, low
power, and high throughput.
• Application-specific processors as a replacement for complex RTL fit this
need.
• The Origins of Configurable Processors:
• A processor had to be “a jack of all trades, master of none.”
• Research in application-specific instruction processors (ASIPs), especially
in Europe (code generation at IMEC, processor specification at the
University of Dortmund, micro-code engines [“transport-triggered
architectures”] at the Technical University of Delft and fast simulation at
the University of Aachen all confirmed the possibility of developing a fully
automated system for designing processors.
15. Configurable, Extensible Processors
• Like RTL-based design using logic synthesis, extensible-processor technology
allows the design of high-speed logic blocks tailored to the assigned task.
• All these software-development tools are built for exactly the same architecture
by the processor generator from the same definition used to build the processor
itself.
• By generating the processor from a high-level description, the system designer
controls all the relevant cost, performance, and functional attributes of the
processor subsystem without having to become a microprocessor design expert.
• The four key questions for the use of configurable and extensible processors in
SoCs are these:
1. What target characteristics of the processor can be configured and extended?
2. How does the system designer capture the target characteristics?
3. What are the deliverables—the hardware and software components—to the
system designer?
4. What are typical results for building new platforms to address emerging
communications and consumer applications?
16. • To be useful for practical SoC development, configuration of the processor
must meet two important criteria:
1. The configuration mechanism must accelerate and simplify the creation of
useful configurations.
2. The generated processor must include complete hardware descriptions
software development tools and verification aids.
• A range of extensible or configurable processors is now widely available.
Configurable products can be roughly categorized into five groups:
• Non-architectural processor configuration
• Fixed menu of processor architecture configurations
• User-modifiable processor RTL
• Processor extension using an instruction-set description language
• Fully automated processor synthesis.
17. • The logical equivalent of the RTL datapaths are implemented using the integer
pipeline of the base processor and additional execution units, registers, and
other functions added by the chip architect for a specific application.
• This design migration from hardwired state machine to firmware program
control has important implications:
1. Flexibility
2. Software-based development
3. Faster, more complete system modeling
4. Unification of control and data
5. Time-to-market
• Configurable and Extensible Processor Feature
• Extending a Processor
• Exploiting Extensibility
• The Impact of Extensibility on Performance
• Extensibility and Energy Efficiency