A design methodology for the implementation of multi-million gate system-on-chip designs is described. The new methodology is based on the creation of a silicon virtual prototype early in the back-end design process. The prototype is generated in a fraction of the time required to complete the traditional back-end flow but still maintains very high correlation with the final design. The physical prototype becomes the 'cockpit' where many design implementation decisions can be optimized by leveraging the short iteration times. Hierarchical design methodologies benefit from the prototyping stage by enabling a more optimal partitioning. The silicon virtual prototype also alters the nature of the hand-off model between front-end and back-end designers. The netlist can now be quickly validated using the prototype: the physical reality is being injected early in the design process resulting in fewer iterations between front-end and back-end.

In this paper, a design methodology for the implementation of multi-million gate system-on-chip designs is described.

In this paper, we introduce a method that uses the field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based emulation system for fault grading. The real-time simulation capability of a hardware emulator could significantly improve the performance of fault grading, which is one of the most time consuming tasks in the circuit design and test process. We employ a serial fault emulation algorithm enhanced by two speed-up techniques. First, a set of independent faults can be injected and emulated at the same time. Second, multiple dependent faults can be simultaneously injected within a single FPGA-configuration by adding extra circuitry. Because the reconfiguration time of mapping the numerous faulty circuits into the FPGA's is pure overhead and could be the bottleneck of the entire process, using extra circuitry for injecting a large number of faults can reduce the number of FPGA-reconfigurations and, thus, improving the performance significantly. In addition, we address the issue of handling potentially detected faults in this hardware emulation environment by using the dual-railed logic. The performance estimation shows that this approach could be several orders of magnitude faster than the existing software approaches for large sequential designs.

In this paper, we propose a method of using an FPGA-based emulation system for fault grading. The real-time simulation capability of a hardware emulator could significantly improve the run-time of fault grading, which is one of the most resource-intensive tasks in the design process. A serial fault emulation algorithm is employed and enhanced by two speed-up techniques. First, a set of independent faults can be emulated in parallel. Second, simultaneous injection of multiple dependent faults is also possible by adding extra supporting circuitry. Because the reconfiguration time spent on mapping the numerous faulty circuits into the FPGA boards could be the bottleneck of the whole process, using extra logic for injecting a large number of faults per configuration can reduce the number of reconfigurations, and thus, significantly improve the efficiency. Some modeling issues that are unique in the fault emulation environment are also addressed. The performance estimation indicates that this approach could be several orders of magnitude faster than the existing software approaches for large designs.

Given a system represented at gate level, we propose an algorithm mapping the design into the minimum number of FPGA's for logic emulation. We first devise a Local Ratio-cut clustering scheme to reduce the circuit complexity. Then a Set Covering partitioning approach, utilizing the paradigm of Espresso II, is proposed as an alternative to the widely adopted recursive partitioning paradigm. Experimental results have shown that our approach achieved significant improvement with much shorter run times compared to the recursive Fiduccia-Mattheyses approach on large designs. For instance, on a benchmark of 160 K gates and 90 K nets, we reduced the number of FPGA's required and the run time by 41 and 86%, respectively.>

Abstract|Given a huge system represented at gate level, we propose an algorithm mapping the design into the minimum number of FPGAs for logic emulation. We rst devise a Local Ratio-cut clustering scheme to reduce the circuit complexity. Then a Set Covering partitioning approach, utilizing the paradigm of Espresso II, is proposed to replace the widely adopted recursive partitioning paradigm. Experimental results show that our approach achieves signi cant improvement inamuch shorter run time compared to the recursive Fiduccia-Mattheyses approach on large designs. For example, on a benchmark of 160K gates and 90K nets, we reduced the number of FPGAs required by 29 % and reduced the run time by 78%. 1