Some Testing Glossary

Black box testing

not based on any knowledge of internal design or code. Tests are based on requirements and functionality.

White box testing

based on knowledge of the internal logic of an application's code. Tests are based on coverage of code statements, branches, paths, conditions.

Unit testing

the most 'micro' scale of testing; to test particular functions or code modules. Typically done by the programmer and not by testers, as it requires detailed knowledge of the internal program design and code. Not always easily done unless the application has a well-designed architecture with tight code; may require developing test driver modules or test harnesses.

Incremental integration testing

continuous testing of an application as new functionality is added; requires that various aspects of an application's functionality be independent enough to work separately before all parts of the program are completed, or that test drivers be developed as needed; done by programmers or by testers.

Integration testing

testing of combined parts of an application to determine if they function together correctly. The 'parts' can be code modules, individual applications, client and server applications on a network, etc. This type of testing is especially relevant to client/server and distributed systems.

Functional testing

black-box type testing geared to functional requirements of an application; this type of testing should be done by testers. This doesn't mean that the programmers shouldn't check that their code works before releasing it (which of course applies to any stage of testing.)

System testing

black box type testing that is based on overall requirement specifications; covers all combined parts of a system.

End-to-end testing

similar to system testing; the 'macro' end of the test scale; involves testing of a complete application environment in a situation that mimics real-world use, such as interacting with a database, using network communications, or interacting with other hardware, applications, or systems if appropriate.

Sanity testing

typically an initial testing effort to determine if a new software version is performing well enough to accept it for a major testing effort. For example, if the new software is crashing systems every 5 minutes, bogging down systems to a crawl, or destroying databases, the software may not be in a 'sane' enough condition to warrant further testing in its current state.

Regression testing

re-testing after fixes or modifications of the software or its environment. It can be difficult to determine how much re-testing is needed, especially near the end of the development cycle. Automated testing tools can be especially useful for this type of testing.

Acceptance testing

final testing based on specifications of the end-user or customer, or based on use by end-users/customers over some limited period of time.

Load testing

testing an application under heavy loads, such as testing of a web site under a range of loads to determine at what point the systems response time degrades or fails.

Stress testing

term often used interchangeably with 'load' and 'performance' testing. Also used to describe such tests as system functional testing while under unusually heavy loads, heavy repetition of certain actions or inputs, input of large numerical values, large complex queries to a database system, etc.

Performance testing

term often used interchangeably with 'stress' and 'load' testing. Ideally 'performance' testing (and any other 'type' of testing) is defined in requirements documentation or QA or Test Plans.

Usability testing

testing for 'user-friendliness'. Clearly this is subjective, and will depend on the targeted end-user or customer. User interviews, surveys, video recording of user sessions, and other techniques can be used. Programmers and testers are usually not appropriate as usability testers.

Install/uninstall testing

testing of full, partial, or upgrade install/uninstall processes.

Recovery testing

testing how well a system recovers from crashes, hardware failures, or other catastrophic problems.

Security testing

testing how well the system protects against unauthorized internal or external access, willful damage, etc; may require sophisticated testing techniques.

Compatibility testing

testing how well software performs in a particular hardware/software/operating system/network/etc. environment.

Exploratory testing

often taken to mean a creative, informal software test that is not based on formal test plans or test cases; testers may be learning the software as they test it.

Ad-hoc testing

similar to exploratory testing, but often taken to mean that the testers have significant understanding of the software before testing it.

User acceptance testing

determining if software is satisfactory to an end-user or customer.

Comparison testing

comparing software weaknesses and strengths to competing products.

Alpha testing

testing of an application when development is nearing completion; minor design changes may still be made as a result of such testing. Typically done by end-users or others, not by programmers or testers.

Beta testing

testing when development and testing are essentially completed and final bugs and problems need to be found before final release. Typically done by end-users or others, not by programmers or testers.

Mutation testing

a method for determining if a set of test data or test cases is useful, by deliberately introducing various code changes ('bugs') and retesting with the original test data/cases to determine if the 'bugs' are detected. Proper implementation requires large computational resources.

Disclaimer: Sent to me by TestMedia Inc.

Interview Questions - Computer Architecture

Some more pointers..

1. Boolean logic Minimization
2. State machine design
3. Synchronous circuit timing, races, testability
4. Pipelines and hazards
5. Processor block diagrams, Cache architecture
6. Microarchitecture techniques

Interview Questions - VLSI

This is a general checklist for freshers to take on the job hunting adventure...

1. CMOS gates, complex gates, Latch and FF design
2. Regions of operation of a MOSFET, IV characteristics in different regions, transistor IV curves
3. Transistor cross-sections
4. Charge storage and how it impacts certain circuits
5. Capacitive coupling
6. Dynamic logic
7. Sources of capacitive load, capacitances between terminals of a MOSFET
8. Various kinds of inverters, switching delay, gain, wire delays
9. Transistor sizing

Interview Question - Scan Test

A 1.2GHz chip has scan chains of length 30,000 bits, 20,000 bits, 24,000 bits, 25,000 bits, and two of 12,000 bits. 500,000 test vectors are used for each scan chain. The tests are run at 50% of full speed.

What is the total test time?
Sol: 20.8 Secs

Interview Question - Effects on power

The VLSI gurus at your company have come up with a way to decrease the average rise and fall time (0-to-1 and 1-to-0 transitions) for signals. The current value is 1ns. With their fabrication tweaks, they can decrease this to 0.85ns

If you implement their suggestions, and make no other changes, what effect will this have on power? (NOTE: Based on the information given, be as specific as possible.)

Sol: Reducing short circuit time from 1 ns to 0.85 ns means reducing raising/falling time. Hence, the new short circuit power is 85% of original.

A group of wannabe performance gurus claim that the above optimization can be used to improve performance by at least 15%. Briefly outline what their plan probably is, critique the merits of their plan, and describe any affect their performance optimization will have on power.

Sol:The plan was probably to increase clock speed by 15%. However reducing
Tshort by 0.15 ns can at most decrease clock period by 2x0.15=0.30ns, while clock perios >> 1ns. Therefore it does not work.

Interview Question - Timing Analysis

If you were to compare a typical digital circuit from 5 years ago with a typical digital circuit today, would you find that the percentage of the total clock period consumed by capacative load has increased, stayed the same, or decreased? Briefly justify your answer.

Sol:
Transistors have gotten smaller, die size has remained roughly the same size or even increased, clock speeds are increasing.

Signals are travelling roughly the same distance as before, but driving smaller capactive loads. Thus, wire delay is not decreasing much, but capacitive load is decreasing.

The clock period is decreasing, so the wire delay is taking up a larger percentage of the clock period and capacitive load delay is taking up a smaller percentage.

Interview Question - Low power design

The new vice president of your company has set up a contest for ideas to reduce leakage power in the next generation of chips that the company fabricates. The prize for the person who submits the suggestion that makes the best tradeoff between leakage power and other design goals is to have a door installed on their cube. What is your door-winning idea, and what tradeoffs will your idea require in order to achieve the reduction in leakage power?

Sol:
Increase transistor size so as to increase threshold voltage. This will require an increase in supply voltage, which will likely increase total power.

Alternative: When increasing transistor size, keep supply voltage the same, but decrease performance.
Alternative: Change fabrication process and materials to reduce leakage current. This will likely be expensive.
Alternative: Use dual-Vt fabrication process.

Interview Question - Low power design

As temperature increases, does the power consumed by a typical combinational circuit increase, stay the same, or decrease? Briefly justify your answer.

Sol:
Short circuiting power will increase because:

• As temperature increases, atoms vibrate more, and so have greater probability of colliding with electrons flowing with current.
• This increases resistivity, which increases delay.
• Signals will rise and fall more slowly, which will increase the short circuiting time, and hence increase short circuiting power

Switching power will increase because of increased resistivity

Comprehensive Verilog Tutorials

The Hyper-links will be updated when the Chapter-wise Tutorials are complete!
Your comments, feedback & suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Chapter 1: Introduction & Overview of modules and procedures
Chapter 2: Language Basics, Net & Register Data Types
Chapter 3: Verilog Simulations & Display Commands
Chapter 4: Continuous Assignments, Time Delays & Timescales
Chapter 5: Verilog Operators, Timing Controls, Decisions & Looping Statements
Chapter 6: RTL Models of Combinational Logic, Interactive Debugging
Chapter 7: RTL models of Sequential Logic, Behavioral Models of RAMs & ROMs
Chapter 8: Modeling Structural Designs
Chapter 9: Blocking & Non Blocking Assignments, State Machine Designs
Chapter 10: File I/O, Test benches, Introduction to Synthesis Design Flows
Chapter 11: Additional Behavioral Commands, Verilog Strength Handling
Chapter 12: Verilog Gate Primitives, user defined Primitives
Chapter 13: Specify Blocks, SDF Back Annotation
Chapter 14: Switch Primitives, Passive Device Modeling

Thanks to Jim Blake of Centillium, Raghav Santhanam of Synopsys & Pedro of Texas A&M University for the Tutorials and other numerous contributions.

Interview Question - Design Guidelines

While you are shopping you encounter your supervisor from last year. He's now forming a startup company. He's writing up the design guidelines that all of their projects will follow. He asks for your advice on some potential guidelines.

What is your response to each question? What is the justification for your answer? What are the trade-offs between the two options?

1. Should all projects use an asynchronous reset signal, or should all use a synchronous reset signal, or should each project choose its own technique?
2. Should all projects use Latches, or should all use Flip Flops, or should each project choose its own technique?
3. Should all chips have registers on the inputs and outputs or should chips have the inputs and outputs directly connected to combinational circuitry, or should each project choose its own technique? By "register" we mean either flip-flops or latches, based upon your answer to the previous question. If your answer is different for inputs and outputs, explain why.
4. Should all circuit modules on all chips have flip-flops on the inputs and outputs or should chips have the inputs and outputs directly connected to combinational circuitry, or should each project choose its own technique? By "register" we mean either flip-flops or latches, based upon your answer to the previous question. If your answer is different for inputs and outputs, explain why.
5. Should all projects use tri-state buffers, or should all projects use multiplexor's, or should each project choose its own technique?

Sol to 1:
Synchronous reset: Synchronous reset leads to more robust designs. With asynchronous reset, a flop is reset whenever the reset signal arrives. Due to wire delays, signals will arrive at different flops at different times. If an asynchronous reset occurs at about the time as a clock edge, some flops might be reset in one clock cycle and some in the next. This can lead to glitches and/or illegal values on internal state signals.

The tradeoff is that asynchronous reset is often easier to code in VHDL and requires less hardware to implement.

Sol to 2:
Flip flops lead to more robust designs than latches. Latches are level sensitive and act as wires when enabled. For a latch based design to work correctly, there cannot be any overlap in the time when a consecutive pair of latches are enabled. If this happens, the value on a signal will “leak” through the latch and arrive at the next set of latches one clock phase too early. Thus, latch based designs are more sensitive to the timing of clock signals. Another disadvantage of
latches is that some FPGAs and cell libraries do not support them. In comparison, D-type flip flops are (almost?) always supported.

The tradeoff is that latches are smaller and faster than flip flops. A common implementation
of a flip-flop is a pair of latches in a master/slave combination.

Sol to 3:
Putting flops on inputs and outputs will make the clock speed of the chip less dependent of the propagation delay between chips. Flops can also be used to isolate the internals of the chip from glitches and other anomolous behaviour that can occur on the boards.

The tradeoff is that flops consume area and will increase the latency through the
chip.

Sol to 4:
Each project should adopt a convention of either using flops on inputs of modules or outputs of modules. It is rarely necessary to put flops on both inputs and outputs of modules on the same chip. This is because the wire delay between modules is usually less than a clock period. Putting flops on either the inputs or outputs is advantageous because it provides a standard design convention that makes it easier to glue modules together without violating timing constraints. If modules were allowed to have combinational circuitry on both inputs and outputs, the maximum
clock speed of the design could not be determined until all of the modules were glued together.

The tradeoff is that flops add area and latency. Sometimes there will be two modules where the combinational circuitry on the outputs of one can be combined with the combinational circuitry on the inputs of the second without violating timing constraints. This discipline prevents that optimization.

Aside: Sometimes, to meet performance targets, in situations such as this, a project will remove or move the flops between modules and do “clock borrowing” to fit the maximum amount of circuitry into a clock period. This is a rather low-level optimization that happens late in the design cycle. It can cause big headaches for functional validation and equivalence verification, because the specifications for modules are no longer clean and the boundaries between modules on the lowlevel design might be different from the boundaries in the high-level design.

Sol to 5:
Multiplexors lead to more robust designs. Tri-state buffers rely on analog characteristics of devices to work correctly. Latches can work incorrectly in the presence of voltage fluctuations or fabrication process variations. Multiplexors work on a purely Boolean level and as such are less sensitive to changes in voltages or fabrication processes.

The tradeoff is that latches are smaller and faster than multiplexor's.

Interview Question - Design & Optimization

This question involves doing some of the design work for a circuit that implements Instruction P and Instruction Q using the components described below.

Instruction P : (i+j+k+l)*m
Instruction Q: a*b*((a*b)+(b*d)+e)

P's Frequency of occurrence is 75%
Q's Frequency of occurrence is 25%

Component Delays:
2 i/p Mult - 40 ns
2 i/p Add - 25 ns
Register - 5ns

• There is a resource limitation of a maximum of 3 input ports i.e, you can assume other inputs to be internal signals in the expression. (There are no other resource limitations.)
• You must put registers on the inputs not the outputs.
• The environment will directly connect your outputs (its inputs) to registers. So no addition register is counted.
  
• Each input value (a, b, d, e, i, j, k, l, m) can be input only once — if you need to use a value in multiple clock cycles, you must store it in a register.
  

1. What is the fastest execution time (for the mixture of Instruction P and Instruction Q given above) that you can achieve for this design, and what clock period do you need to achieve it?
2. Find a minimal set of resources that will achieve the performance you calculated.

Sol to 1: Fastest execution time 140ns, clock period 70ns
Sol to 2: Registers 3, Adders 2, Multipliers 1

Interview Question - Performance Analysis

A farmer is trying to decide which of his two trucks to use to transport his apples along the narrow and winding dirt road from his orchard to the market.

• All of the loads of apples must be carried using the same truck
• Elapsed time is counted from beginning to deliver first load to returning to the orchard after the last load
• Ignore time spent loading and unloading apples, coffee breaks, refueling, etc.

1. Which truck will result in the least elapsed time and what percentage faster will
   the elapsed time be?
2. In planning ahead for next year, is there anything the farmer could do to decrease
   his delivery time with little or no additional expense? If so, what is it, if not, explain.

Sol for 1: Small Truck takes less time & Faster by 4.15 %
Sol for 2: Use two drivers, Use a combination of the small truck and large truck to improve his utilization.

Some good Puzzles / Interview questions

on http://asicdigitaldesign.wordpress.com/
..digest so far..
Puzzle # 1
Puzzle # 2
Puzzle # 3
Puzzle # 4
Puzzle # 5
Puzzle # 6
Puzzle # 7
Puzzle # 8
Puzzle # 9
Puzzle # 10
Puzzle # 11

FerroElectric RAM

If you've fantasized about how wonderful your life could be if the merits of DRAM, SRAM and Flash memory could all be mixed harmoniously into one "dream semiconductor," listen up. You may not be up to speed on all the advancements in ferroelectric materials, but we're pretty sure even the technological newbie could appreciate a new discovery by Korean researcher Dr. Shin Young-han. Reportedly, this fellow has "succeeded in figuring out the operational mechanism of ferroelectrics," which could potentially lead to FeRAM -- a technology that could "store data ten times faster than Flash memory and keep it for longer than ten years." Kudos to you, Dr. Shin, now let's get this stuff on the production line, shall we?

Via: http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200710/200710180013.html

Nokia Q3 profit - 2.2$B

While everyone else was distracted by some touchscreen thing, Nokia spent the past quarter absolutely dominating the worldwide market for low-end phones, and the results, announced today, seem like the company might have the right idea: Nokia's profits rose 85 percent to 1.56B euros ($2.2B) on a sales increase of 28 percent to 12.9B euros ($18.2B). Although the increase this quarter was chalked up to increased sales of phones that cost less that $40 in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, sales did fall in North America -- something Nokia will have to turn around if the company is to achieve its goal of a worldwide 40 percent market share.
That's for another day, though -- for now, onnentoivotus!

Via: NYT

Recipes for an extraordinary career

Skepticism OK – Cynicism NOT!
Skepticism is a method
But
Cynicism is a position!

Recipes for an extraordinary career

Don't hide behind the process!
All good companies have well thought-out processes
But
Don't let it get in the way the way of doing what is right!

Projects

Please check this space in the future!

Tutorials

Please check this space in the future!

E-Books

Hello and Welcome!!
If you are looking for free E-Books you are in the wrong place !!!!!!!
We only feature some good E-Books which you can purchase!!

Thanks

Hierarchy and Power Gating

A scalable approach to chip architecture is essential and valuable since a SOC design today often becomes a component in an even larger chip in subsequent product generations.

To support this portability, module boundaries must be enforced at the power domains level. That is, a given module should belong to a single power domain, not split across several domains. Some tools and flows support RTL process by RTL process assignment to power domains, but this leads to much more complicated implementation and analysis. Clean visibility of the boundaries of a power gated block is key to having a clean, top-down implementation and verification flow.

Although one can in theory nest power gated modules arbitrarily within power gated subsystems which are in turn nested on a shared switched power rail, there are considered benefits in not creating multiple levels of power switching fabric. Power gating is intrusive and ass in some voltage drop and degradation of performance. Cascading multiple voltage drops can lead to unacceptable increases in delay. Even if the design is representeted as hierarchical at the architectural level, the implementation is improved if this is mapped on to a single level of power gating at implementation.

Recommendations:

• Map power gated regions to explicit module boundaries.
• When partitioning a hierarchical power gating design ensure that the power gating control terms can be mapped back to a flat switching fabric.

Pitfalls:

• Avoid control signals passing through power gated or power down regions to other power regions that not hierarchically switched with the first region.
• Avoid excessively fine power gating granularity unless absolutely required for aggressive leakage power management. Every interface adds implementation and verification challenges and complicates the system level production test challenges.
• Avoid a power gating system of more that one or two levels.
  

Architecture and partitioning for low power

A good working definition of architecture ( in the context of IP design, atleast) is the partitioning and interface design of the IP. In supporting various low power strategies, power gating presents the most significant architectural challenge in the architecture of IP.

To support power gating, we need to:

1. Decide when and how the IP will be powered down and powered up.
2. Decide which blocks will be power gated and which blocks will be always on.
3. Design a power controller that controls the power up and power down sequence.
4. Determine which signals need to be isolated during power down.
5. Develop an initial strategy for clocks reset and the power control signals.
   

Recipes for an extraordinary career

Build relationships!
SOWs are necessary for formal agreements
But
A good working relationship will surmount more barriers!

Retention mechanisms in power gated designs

How can we retain state of some of the registers in the design? How to deal with memory state?

Let me try to explain each one of them based on my recent design experience.
For regular logic blocks, there are multiple ways to wake-up faster without losing much of information.

• Use retention flops to save state of some important registers. For example state of control block, which forms the heart of the whole system.
• If the chip is aimed for At-Speed testing, scan chains of the design can be used to scan out the data to an external memory and scan in after wake-up. This may not be as fast as using retention flops.
• ….. there are many more possible methods.

Again w.r.t to retention flops there were questions about, How many type of retention flops are available.
I have seen 3 types.

1. Single save/restore pin retention latch (Slave latch being always on)
2. Single pin balloon Latch
3. Dual Pin balloon Latch

Pro's and Con's of Single Pin Vs Dual Pin retention flops:

Advantages of Single Pin:

• Minimal area impact
• Single signal controls retention

Disadvantages of Single Pin:

• Performance Impact on the register
• Hold Time requirements for the input data

Advantage of Dual Pin:

• Minimal leakage power
• Minimal performance impact compared to the Single Pin design
• Minimal dependency on the clock for the control signals.

Disadvantages of Dual Pin:

• Area Impact
• More Complex System Design
• More Buffer Network and AON network required.

Timing closure impacted by DVFS!!

While designing systems with DVFS techniques, we need to look at the impact of temperature inversion on the performance of the design. An important criteria while selecting voltages and frequencies for a design, one must consider a range such that delay/voltage consistently increases or decreases.

What does this means?
We must always operate above the temperature inversion point.

Especially in low power UDSM process, combined use of reduced VDD and High Threshold voltage may greatly modify the temperature sensitiveness of the design. Due to this, worst case timing is no longer guaranteed at higher temperatures. So in order to guarantee correct behavior of the design, one has to verify the design at various PVT corners. This leads to a significant increase in the total turn around time of the design.

In a nutshell, delay increases with increase in temperature, but below a certain voltage, this relationship inverts and delay starts to decrease with increase in temperature. This is a function of threshold voltage (Threshold voltage and carrier mobility are temperature dependent). Due to this threshold voltage dependency, we have observed that non-critical paths suddenly become critical.

Having said this, as soon as Voltage/Delay relate randomly Voltage Scaling becomes a nightmare to implement and verify.

Note: If both threshold voltage and carrier mobility monotonically decrease with increase in temperature, Operating Voltages(range) defines the performance of the design.

Tip of the day - Board Design

Have you ever asked yourself the question: What should I do with the areas under the ICs?
My advise is: If you have a multilayer board then fill them with copper and connect it to GND, unless you have some very sensitive HF analog ICs where feedback is absolutely unwanted. Use at least two vias to the nearest GND layer and add one via for every square centimeter of copper area you have. This copper fill will give you a better shielding of your signals, the IC's will seem less noisy and less sensitive to EMI due to the tighter coupling to GND and you will get better compliance to the EMC standards.

However keep the areas under the ICs currentless - don't try to use them for decoupling or anything like this.

Recipes for an Extraordinary Career

Integrity is the foundation

Massaging the truth can get you out of an immediate crisis
But
Hidden agendas never remain hidden for long!

Recipes for an Extraordinary Career

Show that passion!

Technical competence is a must
But
It's the "passion" that makes the difference!

Watch out for more of these Recipes...

Dark side of design reviews

Choose your words with care, phrases like "…will never work", "…is useless" etc. will spoil your cooperation with the designer(s) far beyond your current project.

Never count the number of points in your feedback to the designer, or even worse return him pages of long numbered lists. Never consequently call your points for design "errors". If you need to be able to refer to the points on your lists use alphabetically numbered lists. You don't get paid for proving the incompetence of the designer but for improving the quality of the final product, thereby saving your company thousands of dollars.

Remember: The designer is not stupid - Engineers make a lot of errors when they are experienced and know for sure - and take things for granted.

If you try to insist or convince the designer of your point of view you will very soon have an enemy among your colleagues at work. By giving him a less emphasized feedback his responsibility and curiosity makes him pick up the important points in your feedback and at the end of the day you "save his ass" and get a friend.

Design review meetings are not a modern pillory. Only designer(s) and reviewer(s), all working on the project, should attend the meeting.

Voltage and Frequency scaling mechanisms

There are various voltage scaling approaches that are in use today,

Static Voltage Scaling: Different blocks in the design will be operating at different fixed supply voltages
Multi-level Voltage Scaling: An extension to static voltage scaling where in different blocks are switched between two or more voltage levels.
Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling : An extension to Multi-Level Voltage Scaling Voltage levels are dynamically varied as per the work-load of the block
Adaptive Voltage Scaling : An extension to DVFS and its a closed loop representation of the above method. Power Controller block within the design adopts itself dynamically to varying work-loads.
DVFS example: Here is an outline of tasks that will be executed within a design to scale voltage and frequency dynamically, controller first decides the minimum clock speed that meets the workload requirements. It then determines the lowest supply voltage that will support that clock speed. Given below is an example of a sequence thats followed if the target frequency is higher than the current frequency

– Controller monitors the variance in work-load
– Controller detects variation in work-load and programs the device to operate at different voltage
– Block under question continues operating at the current clock frequency until the voltage settles to the new value
– Controller then programs the desired pre-determined clock frequency

Varying clocks and voltages during operation is a new methodology in the design and leads to many challenges in the design process

– Identifying the optimal combination of Voltage/Frequency
– How to model the timing behavior
– Clock and Power Supply locking times.