When you think about it, logic synthesis is a vital but rather intimidating part of modern chip design. This process takes a high-level description of intended functionality, written in an RTL ...

As in any other engineering activity, the design of semiconductor chips (ICs) encompasses several separate, but often closely coupled, design activities. Today's system-on-a-chip (SoC) development ...

While most of the ASIC industry is focused on solving timing and congestion problems at the netlist level, LSI Logic has developed and deployed an innovative methodology to resolve these physical ...

The Unified Power Format (UPF) is used to specify the power intent of a design. Once written, the UPF file is applied at every stage of the design cycle — starting with the RTL, then the gate-level, ...

This paper presents a digital design flow in order to design high performance differential Emitter Coupled Logic (ECL) circuits efficiently. The proposed flow is similar to the ordinary digital CMOS ...

Deep sub-micron effects complicate design closure for very large designs. Top-down hierarchical design methodology combined with physical prototyping increases design productivity and restores ...

True or false: ASIC design follows a very straightforward path that begins with high-level architectural definition. It proceeds through RTL design and preliminary floorplanning. After synthesis, the ...

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are the dominant hardware platform in many safety-critical, low-volume applications, including aerospace and nuclear power plants (NPPs). Modern FPGA devices ...

Clock gating is one of the most frequently used techniques in RTL to reduce dynamic power consumption without affecting the functionality of the design. One method involves inserting gating conditions ...