Sivakumar P R is the Founder and CEO of Maven Silicon. He is responsible for the company’s vision, overall strategy, business, and technology. He is also the Founder and CEO of Aceic Design Technologies.
Sivakumar is a seasoned engineering professional who has worked in various fields, including electrical engineering,… Read More
FPGA Designs have become very complex today, most FPGA Designs could be considered System On Chip Designs because they contain multiple complex system components with different protocol interfaces like AMBA, PCIe, Ethernet, USB, just to name a few of the most popular ones. The complexity itself is already a challenge for verification
Clock domain crossing (CDC) analysis is unavoidable in any modern SoC design and is challenging enough to verify in its own right. CDC plus low power management adds more excitement to your verification task. I wrote on this topic for another solution provider last year. This time I want to intro an interesting twist on the problem,… Read More
The complexity of clock and reset architectures in modern-day SoCs has increased significantly, accentuating the criticality of safe clock and reset domain crossings (CDCs, RDCs). Relying on conventional approaches like structural analysis and limited functional checks followed by manual dispositioning of violations… Read More
Talking not so long ago to a friend from my Atrenta days, I learned that the great majority of design teams still run purely structural CDC analysis. You should sure asynchronous clock domains are suitably represented in the SDC, find all places where data crosses between those domains that require a synchronizer, gray-coded FIFO… Read More
Overview
As designs grow in complexity, rigorous formal verification is essential to meet aggressive requirements for power, performance, area, and time to market. Equivalence checking, static verification, automated ECO, and constraint design for clock domain crossing (CDC) are some of the challenges that signoff designers
Synopsys just released a white paper, a backgrounder on CDC. You’ve read enough of what I’ve written on this topic that I don’t need to re-tread that path. However, this is tech so there’s always something new to talk about. This time I’ll cover a Synopsys survey update on numbers of clock domains in designs, also an update on ways to… Read More
I’m always curious to learn what might be new in clock domain crossing (CDC) verification, having dabbled in this area in my past. It’s an arcane but important field, the sort of thing that if missed can put you out of business, but otherwise only a limited number of people want to think about it to any depth.
The core issue is something… Read More
Bugs are an inescapable reality in any but the most trivial designs and usually trace back to very deterministic causes – a misunderstanding of the intended spec or an incompletely thought-through implementation of some feature, either way leading to reliably reproducible failure under the right circumstances. You run diagnostics,… Read More
When I was at Atrenta, we took advantage of opportunities to expand our static tool (aka linting) first to clock domain crossing (CDC) analysis and DFT compatibility and later to static analysis of timing constraints, all of which have importance in implementation. CDC is commonly thought of as an RTL-centric analysis, however,… Read More
