Tag Archives: RTL

What I did in 8-weeks-VSD Internship? – Open Source Power Analysis Tool Using Python

Power analysis has materialized as a principal theme in today’s world in semiconductor industries. As very large scale integrated circuit (VLSI) are far beyond from human ability because of complexity in nature. So to analyse power in these circuits we use open source computer aided tools, plenty of tools are available but most of them are costly. I designed an open source power analysis tool for the academic use. This tool gives out values of average and leakage power of any circuit by just giving the netlist of circuit file along with name of supply voltage as input. This tool is designed in python language.

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From concept to algorithm – RISC-V floating point addition

First thing which comes in the title is “concept”, which is the simple one. It says, if I want to add 2 floating-point numbers, I simply add them. Second, “algorithm” is the details for a computer, how it will add 2 floating-point numbers.Third, which is “RISC-V”, which deals with binary numbers, describes how can you use same concept and algorithm to do a “binary floating-point addition”

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PPA (power, performance, area) card

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’

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ABI – Get this one right – RISC-V is all yours..

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.

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