In integrated circuit design, hardware emulation is the process of imitating the behavior of one or more pieces of hardware (typically a system under design) with another piece of hardware, typically a special purpose emulation system. The emulation model is usually based on a hardware description language (e.g. Verilog) source code, which is compiled into the format used by emulation system. The goal is normally debugging and functional verification of the system being designed. Often an emulator is fast enough to be plugged into a working target system in place of a yet-to-be-built chip, so the whole system can be debugged with live data. This is a specific case of in-circuit emulation.
Sometimes hardware emulation can be confused with hardware devices such as expansion cards with hardware processors that assist functions of software emulation, such as older daughterboards with x86 chips to allow x86 OSes to run on motherboards of different processor families.
The largest portion of silicon integrated circuit respins and steppings are due at least in part to functional errors and bugs inadvertently introduced at the RTL stage of the design process. Thus, comprehensive functional verification is key to reducing development costs and delivering a product on time. Functional verification of a design is most often performed using logic simulation and/or prototyping on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). There are advantages and disadvantages to each and often both are used. Logic simulation is easy, accurate, flexible, and low cost. However, simulation is often not fast enough for large designs and almost always too slow to run application software against the hardware design. FPGA-based prototypes are fast and inexpensive, but the time required to implement a large design into several FPGAs can be very long and is error-prone. Changes to fix design flaws also take a long time to implement and may require board wiring changes.
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Hardware-software co-design is a well known concept in embedded system design.It is also a concept required in designing FPGA-accelerators in data-centers.This course teaches how to transform algorith
The goal of this lab is to get a working knowledge on the use of industrial state-of-the-art EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools and design kits for the design of analog and digital integrated ci
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Integrated circuit design, or IC design, is a sub-field of electronics engineering, encompassing the particular logic and circuit design techniques required to design integrated circuits, or ICs. ICs consist of miniaturized electronic components built into an electrical network on a monolithic semiconductor substrate by photolithography. IC design can be divided into the broad categories of digital and analog IC design. Digital IC design is to produce components such as microprocessors, FPGAs, memories (RAM, ROM, and flash) and digital ASICs.
An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ˈeɪsɪk) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency video codec. Application-specific standard product chips are intermediate between ASICs and industry standard integrated circuits like the 7400 series or the 4000 series. ASIC chips are typically fabricated using metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) technology, as MOS integrated circuit chips.
In digital circuit design, register-transfer level (RTL) is a design abstraction which models a synchronous digital circuit in terms of the flow of digital signals (data) between hardware registers, and the logical operations performed on those signals. Register-transfer-level abstraction is used in hardware description languages (HDLs) like Verilog and VHDL to create high-level representations of a circuit, from which lower-level representations and ultimately actual wiring can be derived.
The research presented in this article draws inspiration from previous efforts aimed at replicating the functions of various solid-state memristors using a variety of materials. The memristor circuit emulator serves as a cost-effective tool for circuit des ...
Verification and testing of hardware heavily relies on cycle-accurate simulation of RTL.As single-processor performance is growing only slowly, conventional, single-threaded RTL simulation is becoming impractical for increasingly complex chip designs and s ...
The demise of Moore's Law and Dennard scaling has resulted in diminishing performance gains for general-purpose processors, and so has prompted a surge in academic and commercial interest for hardware accelerators.Specialized hardware has already redefined ...