This course provides an introduction to techniques used in design tools for VLSI design. The emphasis will be on the fundamental techniques used in various aspects of automating the design process. In addition future trends in this area will be pointed out. This course is normally taught in the Fall semester.
This course will cover the following topics on embedded computer systems: emergence and growth, position in the electronics industry, example systems, design methodology, design problems, design automation aids. This course is not taught on a regular basis.
This course provides an introduction to the basic concepts involved in logic design. Starting with the two fundamental building blocks, viz. digital gates and Boolean algebra, the principles of logic design will be built up. Particular attention will be paid to current advances in technology and its impact on design techniques and design…
Alumni
- Charlie Shucheng Zhu: (2016, First position, Google)
- Sunha Ahn: (2016, First position, Google)
- Sayak Ray: (Post-Doc) (2016, First position: Intel Corp.)
- Shuyuan Zhang: Computer Network Verification and Management Using Constraint...
Flexible and Scalable Equivalence Checking for Accelerator-Rich Architectures
Modern architecture designs are becoming more heterogeneous. In addition to general purpose processors, accelerators are widely used in System-on-Chips (SoCs). These computation units take advantage of the specialty of the computation to achieve higher performance and better energy efficiency.
The accelerator-rich architecture brings new challenges to verification. As more critical functions are moved to accelerators, our focus of verification needs to be extended from processor to accelerators and their interaction.
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Reverse Engineering Digital Circuits
Significant past work in the area of trojan detection has focused on side-channel analysis, analysis of RTL source code and test coverage to identify "suspicious" circuitry. These techniques assume that trusted ICs and/or RTL source code and tests are available. These assumptions are not justified in many cases, such as when end-users of commercial off the shelf (COTS) ICs would like to examine ICs used in sensitive installations, e.g. government and military facilities. In contrast, our techniques only assume that a gate-level netlist is provided and we attempt to recover high-level...
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Post-Silicon Validation
As integrated circuits scale up, localizing errors during silicon debug becomes very challenging and time-consuming. To free human-beings from this tedious work, my work focus on detecting and localizing bugs by using the automatic formal techniques. More specifically, a hardware design or a software test can be transformed into a symbolic math representation, such that a modern decision procedure tool, e.g. Satisfiability (SAT) or Satisfiability Modular Theory (SMT) solver, can further analyze the verification problem. As an application of artificial intelligence, such decision-making and theorem-proving techniques can facilitate the hardware debugging process without human engagement.... Read more about Post-Silicon Validation
Firmware Verification using Transaction-Level Modeling
The term firmware refers to software that is tied to a specific hardware platform, e.g., low-level drivers that physically interface with the peripherals. Recent trend is that the complicated hardware functionality is migrated into the firmware, thus the co-design of the firmware and hardware components and testing the co-design have been emphasized. To this end, we introduce a specific Service Function Transaction-Level Model (TLM) for modeling the firmware and interacting hardware components. A service function provides a service in response to a specific trigger. This model suits...
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A Note to Prospective Graduate Students
This note is to provide you with some specific information on the graduate admissions process in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Princeton. All applications for graduate admission are evaluated by the admissions committee, independent of the faculty member(s) the applicants have expressed an interest in working with. Based on an absolute ranking, the top students are offered admission. All students offered admission to the PhD program are also assured financial aid for a four year period. Princeton is rather unique in this - most other schools will guarantee only first year support.... Read more