Hardware

In my past, I have gathered my hardware knowledge in a range of categories: Research in general purpose compute architectures – machine vision technology – 4G/5G radio frequency technology – mixed signal interposer technology.

I participated in the whole development flow from concept, implementation, verification to testing on FPGA, tapeout and bringup of silicon.

Digital Design Services I Provide

I have relevant experience in all listed items.

  • System Design
    • Data capturing
    • Data processing & transportation
    • Data output
  • Design for ASIC or FPGA
    • Design concept and RTL implementation from scratch
    • Extending, refactoring design
    • Low power design, low latency design, high performance design
      • Move no data, low clock frequency, few caches, gate everything
    • Optimizing for area, power or performance
    • Clock gating, power gating, data path gating
    • Static timing analysis (only experienced in FPGA)
    • IP integration
    • Mixed-Signal controller design
    • Design for data path and control path
    • toplevel wiring & clocking
    • dynamic reconfiguration
  • Design under microarchitecture considerations for
    • CPUs, DSPs, fully customized accelerators
    • Superscalar or (VL-)VLIW architectures
    • Modifications of instruction set
    • Multicycle pipeline design
    • Exception handling
    • Transparent accelerator design
  • Protocols & Bus interface integration
    • APB
    • AXI-Bus
    • I2C-Bus
    • Fully customized, fault tolerant, highspeed, low latency protocol for board-to-board communication using Xilinx-high-speed transceivers.

Design Verification Services I Provide

I have relevant experience in all listed items.

  • System Verification
    • Testing if output pins show expected behavior for corresponding input vector
    • Bus infrastructure verification
      • Network-on-chip verification
    • Deadlock checks
    • Mixed Signal considerations
  • ASIC Verification
    • Bringup support
    • Clock gating verification
    • Power islands verification
  • Microarchitecture verfification
    • Cache testing
    • Multicore mirroring
    • Multicore cross checks
    • heterogeneous architecture tests CPU to DSP
    • Verification of CPU cores or DSP cores
  • Blocklevel Verification
  • FPGA Verification
    • Design synthesis and testing on FPGA
    • Reading internal registers with ChipScope
    • Using other external indicators like LEDs
  • General
    • Modifying or designing new tests
    • Extending Coverage
    • Increasing coverage by designing tests to cover untested features of architecture
  • Verification Types
    • Full custom testbench, vendor given testbench, UVM
    • Verification with modelling Writing C-model from algorithm specification
    • Cycle and register accurate modelling
    • Transaction accurate modelling
    • Power Aware Simulation
    • blocklevel or toplevel simulations
    • RTL-simulation, netlist simulation, gatelevel simulation, power aware simulation with power islands
    • coverage report simulation
    • Switching Activity power budget verification
  • Stimuli Generation Methods
    • Constraint Random Functional Verification
      • Constraint random stimulus vector generation
      • Design from scratch
      • Extending existing coverage
      • Extending for new features
      • With Modelling
    • Directed Functional Verification
      • Mathematical Modelling
      • Stimuli by highlevel C-driven tests
      • Stimuli by Assembler tests (parallel assembler where needed)
    • Simulations of every level: RTL-, gate- and power-aware-gate-level.; Studied and modified existing testcases to meet new design. Designed new testcases in C to test new architectural features.

Familiar Languages & Tools

  • Languages
    • Verilog / SystemVerilog (with UVM)
    • TCL
    • VHDL
    • SystemC
    • Python, Perl
    • C / C++
    • Shell scripting
    • Gnu make
    • Assembler
  • Tools
    • General
      • Very familiar with Linux
      • Git, SVN, Clearcase
      • Linting scripts
      • Valgrind, gdb
      • Bugzilla, Jira
    • Synopsys
      • DVE, VCS, Verdi, Design Compiler, DesignWare IP
    • Cadence
      • Simvision, Xcelium Simulator
    • Xilinx
      • Vivado, Vivado HLS, ISE, Platform Studio, SDK, iSim
    • Mentor
      • ModelSim
    • Intel/Altera
      • Quartus