Volume 34, Issue 5 (September/October)

Volume: 34 - Issue: 5
September/October 2017

Survey

Challenges and Trends in Modern SoC Design Verification

This paper provides a tutorial overview of the state-of-the-art in verification of complex and heterogeneous Systems-on-Chip. The authors discuss current industrial trends and key research challenges.

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Keynote

Keynote Paper on "Probing Attacks on Integrated Circuits: Challenges and Research Opportunities "

As a type of invasive physical attacks, probing attacks are able to access and directly monitor security critical nets of an IC and extract sensitive information. In this paper, the authors summarize the state-of-the-art probing and anti-probing technologies and their challenges, and discuss the opportunities in the relevant research. ...

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author photos 2

Perspective from Francky Catthoor and Guido Groeseneken "Will Chips of the Future Learn How to Feel Pain and Cure Themselves? "

Extended transistor scaling has brought us a lot of benefits, but also a myriad of problems, including severe reliability issues [1]. To extend the scaling path as far as possible, system architects and technologists have to work together. They have to find solutions—e.g., at system level—to realize self-healing chips, chips that can d...

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From the EIC

Verification and Test

This issue is focused on the special issue on “Emerging Challenges and Solutions in SoC Verification” from Guest Editors Magdy Abadir, Jayanta Bhadra, Wen Chen, and Li-C Wang. This special issue on verification is very timely, as new developments demand new verification techniques. For instance, the increasing heterogeneity of on-chip-...

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Verification

Guest Editors' Introduction: Emerging Challenges and Solutions in SoC Verification

Verification has been one of the major bottlenecks in integrated circuit design process, which is exacerbated by the sheering design complexities nowadays. The increased design size is only one dimension of the growing complexities. Recent System-on-Chips (SoC) often feature multiple heterogeneous embedded processors and accelerators. ...

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Challenges and Trends in Modern SoC Design Verification

This paper provides a tutorial overview of the state-of-the-art in verification of complex and heterogeneous Systems-on-Chip. The authors discuss current industrial trends and key research challenges.

Read more...

Formal-Based Design and Verification of SoC Arbitration Protocols: A Comparative Analysis of TDMA and Round-Robin

As System-On-Chips (SoCs) Are increasing in size and complexity, their validation and verification have become important and more difficult to achieve. Currently, the most widely used SoC design is typically bus based and consists of shared communication resources managed by dedicated arbiters that are in charge of serializing access r...

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Keynote Paper

Probing Attacks on Integrated Circuits: Challenges and Research Opportunities

As a type of invasive physical attacks, probing attacks are able to access and directly monitor security critical nets of an IC and extract sensitive information. In this paper, the authors summarize the state-of-the-art probing and anti-probing technologies and their challenges, and discuss the opportunities in the relevant research. ...

Read more...

General Interest

Tackling Test Challenges for Interposer-Based 2.5-D Integrated Circuits

2.5-D integrated circuit (IC) is a cost-efficient alternative to through-silicon-via (TSV)-based 3-D IC. In this paper, the authors give a comprehensive summary of the testing challenges of 2.5-D ICs and their existing solutions. They then present a test architecture using e-fuses for prebond interposer testing and a method to reduce p...

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Departments

Will Chips of the Future Learn How to Feel Pain and Cure Themselves?

Extended transistor scaling has brought us a lot of benefits, but also a myriad of problems, including severe reliability issues [1]. To extend the scaling path as far as possible, system architects and technologists have to work together. They have to find solutions—e.g., at system level—to realize self-healing chips, chips that can d...

Read more...

Engineering Secure Internet of Things Systems

For the past thirty years, we have all suffered from poor security on our PCs, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. This has happened despite there being a relatively small number of reasonably expensive machines to protect—no more than a few per household. Our bank accounts and reputations may be at risk today, but seldom our lives. ...

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To Verification Infinity and Beyond

When I worked for AT&T over 20 years ago, we knew that, if we messed up, the results could get onto the front page of the New York Times. This was not hyperbole; someone made a tiny change to telephone switch software, the change was thought too small to be worth verifying, and due to some obscure interactions between telephone swi...

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