Theoretical concepts required to design a best performing Chip and gadgets.
The above waterfall diagram is representing a sequence of instructions that are fetched from memory and how they progress to the various stages of pipeline. In the above diagram you got program counter (P), fetch (F), decode (D), register read (R), execute (E) and register write (W). We fetch one instruction at a time. Potentially, you can fetch multiple instructions at a time, which would be a super-scalar architecture.
Well, that’s was just a demo of the powerful efabless platform. Do you want to know more about this powerful yet simple platform? Do you want to build complete SoC using this platform? We did an entire webinar on this, and here’s the copy of it.
This webinar will talk about how do you do that using Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques. Participants for this webinar range from students to some of service company India head and Program managers. So we will cover from basics to advanced + labs on cloud.
A timing ECO should be power, performance and area aware and that was the crux of this webinar, where we discussed several strategies about how to do effective ECO as an expert .Slack based ECO is a beautiful strategy which helps you to achieve your timing target, while helping you to reduce on power and area
SPI model is a master/slave model. There’s some SPI master which determines who gets to transmit and who gets to receive. The output from SPI master is called MOSI (Master Out Slave In). If you have 2 slaves, slave 1 and slave 2, as shown below, MOSI goes to all the slaves .Then you have another line MISO (Master In Slave Out). All the wires are connected, as shown in below image. Then you have a master only function called SCLK, which goes to all the slaves. Now also, there must be a slave select (SS) for S1 and a slave select for S2.
A PPA card like the above, is something which every VLSI engineer should be carrying like a business card. Why? Right from RTL to synthesis to PNR to signoff, we do things like upsize, downsize, VT swap, and many more, and all these factors impacts or tweaks your design PPA in one way or the other.
Let’s take an example of ‘downsize’
the flowchart is what you need to understand just to be an expert in the field of VLSI and semiconductors. Every topic shown in above image is a field, and every topic has a beautiful physics behind it, which when blended with tools in a video course, becomes a master-piece
Why “integrated”? Because at lower nodes, you have to integrate other parts of the flow. Sign-off (you can see power and timing buttons below), clock tree synthesis (you can see synthesis button) must be integrated, so we have a fully integrated PnR flow that we built from day one.
The final instruction which is ‘bne’ is ‘branch if not equal’ which is essentially means to branch to a different address location pointed by ‘overflow’, if t3 is not equal to t4, which is the case here. So, here’s where the overflow is detected and an error message will be printed out, informing ‘you are out of range’
ABI (application binary interface), as the name says, is an interface, that helps programs access system hardware and services.RISC-V architecture has 32 registers (we explained, in detail, why this architecture has 32 registers in our online course). Application programmer, can access each of these 32 registers through its ABI name, for example, you need know the value of stack pointer or move the stack pointer, all you need to do is “addi sp, sp, -16”, where ‘sp’ is the ABI name of stack pointer.