Interview Questions
Interview Question
Your group designs a microprocessor for use in cell phones and palmtop computers. You currently fabricate your chips on…
Interview Questions
Interview Question
The average performance of products in your market segment triples every 36 months. Your design engineers have proposed…
Interview Questions
Interview Question
When trying to validate the behavior of a circuit under boundary conditions, would you use coverage monitors or asserti…
Interview Questions
Interview Question
When writing a specification for a circuit, the specification should be "obviously correct". What does this m…
Interview Questions
Interview Question
What are the main differences between reference model testbenches and relational style testbenches? For what types of c…
Interview Questions
Interview Question
For a system with 64 primary inputs, 1024 internal states, 6,120 combinational signals, and 14 primary outputs, how man…
Interview Questions
Interview Question
Your task is to predict the maximum performance that you can achieve if you implement the following pseudocode in hardw…
Interview Questions
Interview Question
The well-dressed marketing group just learned that a circuit you designed has undetectable faults. They are debating th…
Interview Questions
Interview Question - Low power
You are on a team that is exploring power reduction techniques for a new design. The details of the design and implemen…
DataFlow
Dataflow Diagrams
Dataflow diagrams are data-dependency graphs where the computation is divided into clock cycles. Purpose: Provide a dis…
Models
Algorithms and High level models
For designs with significant control flow, algorithms can be described in software languages, flowcharts, abstract stat…
Interview Questions
Interview question - Fabrication, Hypothesis, Power, Process
While you are eating lunch at your regular table in the company cafeteria, a vice president sits down and starts to tal…
Interview Questions
Interview question - Clock and Voltage
Increasing clock speed without increasing power... The following are given: You need to increase the clock speed of a…
Interview Questions
Interview question - Power & Area
One day you are strolling the hallways in search of inspiration, when you bump into a person from the marketing departm…
Interview Questions
Interview question
If you were to compare a typical digital circuit from 5 years ago with a typical digital circuit today, would you find …
Interview Questions
Basic Timing - Interview question
Assume that the timing diagram shows the limits of the allowed times (either minimum or maximum). For each of the terms…
Interview Questions
Interview Questions
If you have to write your own code (i.e. you do not have a library of memory components or a special component generati…
VHDL
Comparison of VHDL to Other Hardware Description Languages
VHDL Disadvantages VHDL is verbose, complicated and confusing Many different ways of saying the same thing Constructs t…
Power
Power Analysis and Power-Aware Design - Part 1
Importance of Power and Energy: Laptops, PDA, cell-phones, etc —obvious! For microprocessors in personal computers, eve…
Learning
Delay Modelling and Coding Guidelines
In digital logic design, there are different types of delay modeling. Some of the commonly used delay modeling techniqu…
Wishes
New Year's Wishes
May you get a clean bill of health from your dentist, your cardiologist, your gastro-enterologist, your urologist, your…
Editorial
Future Trends!!
How long do you think DVDs have around? 20 years? 10 years? Actually, they have only been around for about seven years,…
GLS
Gate Level Simulation, Part - II
Gate level simulation is used in the late design phase to increase the level of confidence about a design implementat…
Verilog
Verilog rules that can save your breath !
This article contains some thoughts of mine about how and engineer should write Verilog code for Synthesis, general rul…