Search results

The paper aims to develop a systematic approach to design, integrate, and implement a set of crypto cores in a system-on-chip SoC) environment for data security applications. The advanced encryption standard (AES) and PRESENT block ciphers are deployed together, leading to a common crypto chip for performing encryption and decryption operations.

An integrated very large-scale integration (VLSI) architecture and its implementation for the AES and PRESENT ciphers is proposed. As per the choice, the architecture performs encryption or decryption operations for the selected cipher. Experimental results of the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) implementations and related design analysis are provided.

FPGA implementation of the architecture on Xilinx xc5vfx70t-1-ff1136 device consumes 19% slices, whereas the ASIC design is implemented in 180 nm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor ASIC technology that takes 1.0746 mm² of standard cell area and consumes 14.26 mW of power at 50 MHz clock frequency. A secure audio application using the designed architecture on an open source SoC environment is also provided. A test methodology for validation of the designed chip using an FPGA-based platform and tools is discussed.

The proposed architecture is compared with a set of existing hardware architectures for analyzing various design metrics such as latency, area, maximum operating frequency, power, and throughput.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging is the most computational intensive algorithm and this makes its implementation challenging for real-time application. This paper aims to present the chirp-scaling algorithm (CSA) for real-time SAR applications, using advanced field programmable gate array (FPGA) processor.

A chirp signal is generated and compressed using range Doppler algorithm in MATAB for validation. Fast Fourier transform (FFT) and multiplication operations with complex data types are the major units requiring heavy computation. Therefore, hardware acceleration is proposed and implemented on NEON-FPGA processor using NE10 and CEPHES library.

The heuristic analysis of the algorithm using timing analysis and resource usage is presented. It has been observed that FFT execution time is reduced by 61% by boosting the performance of the algorithm and speed of multiplication operation has been doubled because of the optimization.

Very few literatures have presented the FPGA-based SAR imaging implementation, where analysis of windowing technique was a major interest. This is a unique approach to implement the SAR CSA using a hybrid approach of hardware–software integration on Zynq FPGA. The timing analysis propagates that it is suitable to use this model for real-time SAR applications.

The Purpose of this research is to make an energy efficient finite state machine (FSM) in order to achieve the core objective of green computing because FSM is an indispensable part of multiple computer hardware.

This study uses ultra-scale plus FPGA architecture in place of seven-series field-programmable gate array (FPGA) for the implementation of the FSM design and also uses output load scaling for the design of environment-friendly FSM. This design study is done using Verilog Hardware description language and Vivado integrated system environment design tools and implemented on 16 nm ultra-scale FPGA architecture.

There is up to 98.57% reduction in dynamic power when operating frequency is managed as per smart job scheduling. There is up to a 21.97% reduction in static power with proper management of output load capacitance. There is up to 98.43% saving in dynamic power with the proposed management of output load capacitance.

The proposed design will be environment friendly that eventually leads to the green earth. This is the main motive of the research area i.e. green computing.

Privacy and security of personal data is the prime concern in any communication. Security algorithms play a crucial role in privacy preserving and are used extensively. Therefore, these algorithms need to be effective as well as energy-efficient. Advanced Encryption Standards (AES) is one of the efficient security algorithms. The principal purpose of this research is to design Energy efficient implementation of AES, as it is one of the important aspects for a step toward green computing.

This paper presents a low voltage complementary metal oxide semiconductor (LVCMOS) based energy efficient architecture for AES encryption algorithm on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform. The experiments are performed for five different FPGAs at different input/output standards of LVCMOS. Experiments are performed separately at two frequencies (default and 1.6 GHz).

The comparative study of total on-chip power consumption for different frequency suggested that LVCMOS12 performed best for all the FPGAs. Also, Kintex-7 Low Voltage was found to be the best performing FPGA. At 1.6 GHz frequency, the authors observed 55% less on-chip power consumption when switched from Artix-7 with LVCMOS33 (maximum power consuming combination) to Kintex-7 Low Voltage with LVCMOS12. Mathematical models are developed for the proposed design.

The green implementation of AES algorithm based on LVCMOS standards has not been explored yet by researchers. The energy efficient implementation of AES will certainly be beneficial for society as it will consume less power and dissipate lesser heat to environment.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an approach towards code validation of RISC microcontrollers, which helps to automate software debugging. A static machine code analysis which checks the appropriateness of instructions in a sequence to identify any logical mistakes and also to identify redundant codes appearing in a program for the target processor is presented.

Validation is done with the help of rules of inferences formulated for the target processor. The rules govern the occurrence of illegitimate/out of place instructions and code sequences for executing the computational and integrated peripheral functions. The stipulated rules are encoded in propositional logic formulae and their compliance is tested in all possible execution paths of the application programs. An incorrect sequence of machine code pattern is identified using slicing techniques on the control flow graph generated from machine code.

The results explain that the technique is independent of compiler/assembler and contributes to early detection of software bugs that are otherwise hard to detect. Program states are identified mainly with machine code pattern, which drastically reduces the state space creation contributing to an improved state‐of‐the‐art model checking.

Though the technique described is general, the implementation is highly architecture oriented, and hence the feasibility study is conducted only on PIC16F87X microcontrollers.

This validation tool can be integrated to the system development environment resulting in improved software quality and reduced debugging time.

It is a novel and original approach at machine code level applicable to a wide range of processors once appropriate rules are available.

Increasingly complex and sophisticated VLSI design, coupled with shrinking design cycles, requires shorter verification time and efficient debug method. Logic simulation provides SoC verification with full controllability and observability, but it suffers from very slow simulation speed for complex design. Using hardware emulation such as FPGA can have higher simulation speed. However, it is very hard to debug due to its poor visibility. SOC HW/SW co‐verification technique seems to draw a balance, but Design Under Test (DUT) still resides in FPGA and remains hard for debugging. The purpose of this paper is to study a run‐time RTL debugging methodology for a FPGA‐based co‐verification system.

The debugging tools are embedded in HDL simulator using Verilog VPI callback, so signals of testbench and internal nodes of DUT can be observed in a single waveform and updated as simulation runs, making debugging more efficient. The proposed debugging method connects internal nodes directly to a PCI‐extended bus, instead of inserting extra scan‐chain logic, so the overhead for area is reduced.

This method provides internal nodes probing on an event‐driven co‐verification platform and achieves full observability for DUT. The experiment shows that, compared with a similar method, the area overhead for debug logic is reduced by 30‐50 per cent and compile time is shortened by 40‐70 per cent.

The proposed debugging technique achieves 100 per cent observability and can be applied to both RTL and gate‐level verification. The debugging tool is embedded into HDL simulator using Verilog VPI callback, so DUT signals are displayed together with testbench signals in the same waveform viewer. New value of DUT signal is read from FPGA whenever it changes, which allows run‐time debug.

With the rapid development of integrated circuits, verification of SOC chips has become a great challenge due to its integration and complexity. Traditional software‐based simulation methodology cannot meet verification needs. Therefore, FPGA‐based hardware acceleration technologies are requested in SOC verification. The classic methodology of hardware acceleration downloads the DUT (Device under Test) to the FPGA, while part of RTL codes and test bench is still run on the simulator in the workstation. Research found that the speed bottleneck of this methodology is mostly caused by the ping‐pong mode of data transmission between workstation software and the FPGA emulator, thus resulting in that channel transmission time takes too much proportion of total time. The purpose of this paper is to present a vector mode based hardware/software co‐emulation methodology, which leverages a pipeline structure to transmit, receive and buffer data. This methodology reduces the communication overhead by carrying out a parallel mechanism in that while user's design is under test in the emulator, signal data are transmitting in the channel simultaneously, thus increasing the speed of hardware acceleration and emulation.

The methodology of hardware acceleration proposed by this paper intercepts data for once from the emulation process of a traditional platform as test bench and utilizes direct memory access (DMA) channel to speed up data transfer, as well as increasing reasonable data caching mechanism, which reduces the ratio of channel transmission time in the entire emulation time, achieving accelerating emulation.

The proposed methodology and traditional hardware acceleration approach were tested on a quasi‐cyclic low‐density parity‐check (LDPC) decoder. Experiment results indicate that the proposed method can increase communication throughput 140 times compared with the traditional approach.

A vector mode based hardware/software co‐emulation methodology is presented in the paper. Higher communication throughput can be achieved by carrying out a parallel mechanism, as well as leveraging a pipeline structure to transmit, receive and buffer data.

With the growing system‐on‐a‐chip (SOC) design complexity, SOC verification has become a major congestion. In this context, efficient and reliable verification environment is requested for SOC design before it is committed to production. The purpose of this paper is to judge whether the hardware and or software (HW/SW) co‐verification environment can handle SOC verification and provide the necessary performance in terms of co‐verification speed and throughput, power and resource consumption, timing analysis, etc.

A finite‐impulse‐response filter is utilized as a device‐under‐test to compare pure SW simulation, Modelsim simulator in this case, and HW/SW co‐verification approaches to decide on whether the HW/SW co‐verification environment can do work or not. In addition, the performance of the HW/SW co‐verification environment is estimated based on specifications such as co‐verification speed and throughput, power and resource consumption, and timing analysis.

From experiment results, conclusions can be drawn that the more complicated SOC is, the greater the potential speedup of the co‐verification approach over SW simulation is. However, the communication between SW and HW in HW/SW co‐verification system is a major congestion, which may offset the acceleration achieved by moving large computation from the SW to the HW side.

Performance estimation for the HW/SW co‐verification environment has been conducted in terms of co‐verification speed and throughput, power and resource consumption, timing analysis, etc.