CIF: Small: Towards Practical Validation Of Nonlinear Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuits

CIF：小：实现非线性模拟和混合信号电路的实际验证

• 批准号: 1423431
• 负责人: Shobha Vasudevan
• 金额: $ 44.86万
• 依托单位: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-08-01 至 2017-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1423431&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CIF; Small; Towards; Practical; Validation

Analog components are increasingly prevalent in our mobile, handheld, health monitoring, automotive, GPS and other embedded devices (e.g., in the iphone 5, twenty out of twenty eight components are of analog/mixed signal type). The benefit of using analog devices over purely digital devices is that they offer low power, low cost and high flexibility of parameters in the design space. However, the design flexibility comes with a tradeoff of complexity in the verification/validation of these systems. While verification of the correctness of a digital design is a hard problem, analog systems introduce complexity in behavior that surpasses digital verification. Hence, with the growing use of analog components, ensuring that these systems are correct is critical to their design process. Since analog components were isolated single components in previous generations of devices, there has been a void in the research in this area. This project attempts a methodology to provide a quantum leap over the current practices of analog validation and have the potential to bridge the gap between analog design and design automation tools, paving the way for other analog verification methodologies to evolve further. Course material on analog and mixed signal verification for undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Illinois and elsewhere will be developed as part of the proposal. MyTri, a professional networking portal for women in computing will be further developed by the PI with NSF funds as well. From a technical standpoint, the design of analog and mixed-signal are much more complicated than purely digital design, due to nonlinear behavior, continuous state spaces, as well as traditional methods of manual validation. In the context of system level integration, Monte Carlo simulations methods, the de facto standard for analog circuit validation, fall short of the intended goal of providing an ability to generate input stimulus, control the type of simulations, specify desired constraints or trigger events, as well as provide debugging, diagnosis capacity and a method to evaluate the test coverage. This work proposes a validation environment with all the capabilities listed above. The proposal is to analyze randomized tree based search algorithms. These algorithms can be made controllable to achieve different validation objectives. The problems addressed in the proposed work are computationally very complex, and thus, scalable solutions to these problems is a challenge that will also be addressed.

模拟元件在我们的移动的、手持式、健康监测、汽车、GPS和其他嵌入式设备（例如，在iPhone5中，28个组件中的20个是模拟/混合信号类型）。与纯数字器件相比，使用模拟器件的好处在于它们在设计空间中提供低功耗、低成本和高参数灵活性。然而，设计的灵活性来权衡这些系统的验证/确认的复杂性。虽然验证数字设计的正确性是一个困难的问题，但模拟系统在行为上引入了超越数字验证的复杂性。因此，随着模拟元件的使用越来越多，确保这些系统的正确性对其设计过程至关重要。由于模拟器件在前几代器件中都是孤立的单个器件，因此这方面的研究一直是空白。该项目尝试了一种方法，以提供对当前模拟验证实践的巨大飞跃，并有可能弥合模拟设计和设计自动化工具之间的差距，为其他模拟验证方法的进一步发展铺平道路。作为提案的一部分，将为伊利诺伊大学和其他地方的本科生和研究生编写模拟和混合信号验证课程材料。公共信息学院还将利用国家科学基金的资金进一步开发MyTri，这是一个为计算机领域的妇女提供的专业网络门户。 从技术角度来看，由于非线性行为、连续状态空间以及传统的手动验证方法，模拟和混合信号的设计比纯数字设计复杂得多。在系统级集成的背景下，蒙特卡罗模拟方法，模拟电路验证的事实上的标准，达不到预期的目标，即提供生成输入激励的能力，控制模拟的类型，指定所需的约束或触发事件，以及提供调试，诊断能力和评估测试覆盖率的方法。这项工作提出了一个验证环境与上面列出的所有功能。该建议是分析基于随机树的搜索算法。可以使这些算法可控以实现不同的验证目标。在拟议的工作中解决的问题是计算非常复杂的，因此，这些问题的可扩展的解决方案是一个挑战，也将得到解决。