Digital System Design - Development Tasks

Main development tasks needed for Digital System Design -

A)  All required component design - Digital Block (RTL Design) and Analog Block (Circuit Design)

B) Synthesis

C) Physical Design

D) Verification

E) Testing


B) Synthesis:

- A refinement process that realizes a description with components from the lower abstraction level.

- The resulting description is a structural view in the lower abstraction level

- Type of synthesis: –

1) High-level synthesis

2) RT level synthesis

3) Gate level synthesis

4) Technology mapping

C) Physical Design:

- Placement and routing – Refining from structural view to physical view – Derive lay out of a netlist

- Circuit extraction: – Determine the wire resistance of capacitance

- Others – Derivation of power grid and clock distribution network, assurance of signal integrity etc

D) Verification:

- Check whether a design meets the specification and performance goals.

- Concern the correctness of the initial design and the refinement processes

- Two aspects – Functionality and Performance (timing)

- Method of Verification

1) Simulation – spot check: cannot verify the absence of errors – Can be computation inensive

2) Timing analysis – Just check delay

3) Formal verification – apply formal math techniques determine its property – Example - equivalence checking

4) Hardware emulation

E) Testing:

- Testing is the process of detecting physical defects of a die or a package occurred at the time of manufacturing

- Testing and verification are different tasks.

- Difficult for large circuit – Need to add auxiliary testing circuit in design – E.g., built-in self test (BIST), scan chain etc