IDT2016

IDT 2016 Tutorials include:


 

New approaches towards early dependability evaluation of digital integrated systems

Abstract

Integrated embedded systems are increasingly used in many applications, including critical ones. The fast growing Internet-of-Things markets still increase concerns about reliability, safety and security. Circuits made in up-to-date technologies are more sensitive to perturbations, in spite of manufacturing progress, due to the number of functions implemented in a single chip. Malicious attacks are based on creating errors to take the control of a system and/or steal private data. In this context, an increasing number of designers need to take care, early in the design flow, of consequences of soft errors (i.e., errors in the processed data, without physical defect induced in the chip).

The usual means for early evaluating dependability is fault injections. Many approaches and tools have been developed. This tutorial will discuss alternative approaches that lead to optimized evaluation durations (and therefore easier iterations) while providing good accuracy. Presented approaches do not require any specific equipment or skill, but just leverage developments made for functional verification

Qualifications of the instructor

Régis LEVEUGLE received the PhD degree in Microelectronics from the National Polytechnical Institute of Grenoble (INPG), France, in 1990. He is currently Professor at Grenoble Institute of Technology. His main interests are computer architecture, VLSI design methods and CAD tools, fault-tolerant architectures, secure circuits, concurrent checking and dependability analysis. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 scientific papers and served as a reviewer for numerous journals and conferences. He has also served on numerous program and organization committees.

He was General co-Chair for DFT'02, vice General Chair for IOLTW'02, Program co-Chair for DFT'01, IOLTS'04 and IOLTS'06, vice Program Chair for IOLTS'03, IOLTS'05 and IOLTS'07, Industrial Co-Chair for ETS'12, and Topic Chair for ETS'08, ETS'09, ETS'10, ETS'14, ETS'15 and ETS'16. He is a Senior member of IEEE.

Contact:

Régis LEVEUGLE
Univ. Grenoble Alpes
TIMA Laboratory
46 Avenue Félix Viallet
38031 Grenoble Cedex, France
Regis.Leveugle@imag.fr


 

Challenges of FPGA-Based Prototyping & Debugging 

Abstract

Software has come to dominate system-on-chip (SoC) development. It is increasingly common for the software effort to be on the critical path of the project schedule. Only FPGA-based prototyping provides both the speed and accuracy necessary to develop and validate complex software integration prior to silicon. The exciting benefits of an FPGA-based prototype are:

  • Quick fine tuning of hardware/software integration and software validation pre-silicon

  • In-system device validation with real-time interfaces and in end application

  • Extended register transfer level (RTL) testing and debugging

So if your designs are getting larger and more complex than ever, if you need to build and validate systems with millions gates count that exceed the performance and capacity limits of the traditional SW-Simulators and if your system contains pre-built design IPs and SW components that need to have a fully functioning hardware platform as early as possible. We invite you to join us for FPGA-Based Prototyping Tutorial where you will get introduced to the major challenges in FPGA-Based prototyping and debugging. Our tutorial will cover:

Introduction: An Overview about the latest FPGA Verification Technology Adoption Trends will be addressed as well as the basics of FPGA flow.

FPGA-Based Prototyping: Prototyping next-generation SoCs, which contain more functionality than the capacity offered by a single FPGA, means spreading that functionality across multiple FPGAs, leading to challenging partitioning and timing closure issues. Traditional prototyping solutions manage device under test (DUT) partitioning either at the RTL level or at the gate level, but they fail to offer a predictable and efficient flow that would allow the FPGA-based SoC prototype to be brought up quickly. VPS (Veloce Prototyping System) tackles FPGA-based prototyping challenges and offers SoC designers an innovative methodology unifying the benefits of gate-level partitioning and RTL partitioning, providing a short, automated, and predictable path to prototype

Multiple FPGA Prototyping Challenges: Multi-FPGA partitioning is a complex optimization problem that must handle multiple constraints and concurrent objectives. The partitioning challenges that have to be overcome to make FPGA-based prototyping effective are: Heterogeneous FPGA logic resources management, Unbalanced interconnect management and pin multiplexing, Timing closure issues and timing constraints generation, Incremental flow for fast turnaround, Full system verification and simulation as well as Bug hunting methodologies

FPGA Debugging: Recall that, to debug an FPGA prototype, probes are added directly to the RTL design to make specific signals available for observation, synthesized and downloaded to the FPGA prototype platform. Fortunately, major FPGA vendors today have internal logic analyzers to address the visibility issue. However, many of these internal logic analyzers have several limitations, including support for only single FPGA debug, limited memory size using FPGA internal memory, and long place-and-route times to change probes while large SoCs efficient debugging often requires concurrent access to hundred thousand or more of design signals. Accordingly we will demonstrate how advanced FPGA debugging techniques allow thousands of signals to be traced with huge trace depth by the use of highly efficient multi-stage concentrator as the basis for its observation network, employing data compression on the trace data to overcome the limited RAM resources in any FPGA, or streaming FPGA run trace to external memory or directly to the host via a fast connection buses.

Design Challenges for FPGA some insights about the long initial time required for bringing up the prototype and how setting up a design for FPGA prototype may be a time-consuming activity that includes error-prone sub-tasks, hence a careful planning is required in order to accomplish prototyping goals with minimal effort.

Qualifications of the instructors

Dr. Zied Marrakchi is Engineering Manager in charge of Mentor Graphics Tunisian R&D FPGA Prototyping activity. Prior to that he was co-founder and chief technology officer at Flexras Technologies which was acquired by Mentor Graphics in January 2015. He holds a PhD in microelectronics and computer science from the University of Pierre and Marie Curie Paris and has Electrical engineering degree from National School of Engineers of Tunis

 

Eman El Mandouh is Quality Assurance Manager for Design Verification Technology Division (DVT) , Mentor Graphics Corporation. She owns more than 15 years of experience in the field of digital design and functional verification technology namely simulation based verification, Advanced formal verification solutions, Coverage driven verification, intelligent test generation, FPGA Prototype & Debugging. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Cairo University where she obtained her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Engineering in 2000, 2013 respectively.

Her PHD graduation thesis is about “Exploring Machine Learning techniques in Functional Verification Field”, she had been certified as Green Belt Six Sigma for Information Technology and Software Engineering from the European Software Institute (ESI) and Certified Quality Manger and Organizational Excellence from American Society of Quality. She published number of articles in the field of assertion based verification, machine learning and Software testing.


 

 

 

 

Important Dates

- November 3, 2016

  Regular Paper Submission

- November
23, 2016
 Acceptance Notification

- December
4, 2016
  Final Submission and Registration


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December 18-20:
    IDT 2016