Research Themes 2004.03


LSI Chip Projects

High Level Design and Verification

With the recent advances on integrated circuits, it has been feasible to integrate a whole information system on a single LSI chip. The design level becomes high corresponding to the size of the system. In our laboratory, we are working on the high level design methods using programming language such as C language or Java, and the design verification methods. The design verification is specific to hardware design since the fabrication of a new LSI chip takes a lot of time and expense. The penaly in the fabricated chips is larger than the software products. The following list shows the current themes.
  1. Bit Width (Bit Length) Optimization to Reduce the Area and Speed in High-Level Synthesis
  2. C Language based Processor Design
  3. High Level Equivallence Checking for Hand Optimization
  4. High Level Verification Based on the Logic Function Manipulation Methods such as BDD and SAT

Reconfigurable hardware
and Its Application

Reconfigurable hardware such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) has an ability to change its functionality after the fabrication. So reconfigurable modules behaves as a kind of software, whose bug can be fixed by rewriting. Reconfigurable hardware is widely used in the prototyping of application specific hardware for functional verification. The architecutre of FPGA is basicully suffer from the large area and slow speed for implementing some module compared to ASIC. We are working on the novel architectures of FPAGs and their applications.
  1. A new Look Up Table based FPGA with Folding Mechanism
  2. Reconfigurable Modules in a Multi-Thread Processor
  3. Mapping Algorithms for FPGA

Design and Implementation
of System LSI Chips

For the feasibility study of our design, we are developing several LSI chips per year. We have been collaborating with VLSI Design Education Center (VDEC) at University of Tokyo. When designing LSI chips, we are searching new design methods and verification methods.
  1. Cryptosystem LSI chips
  2. Real Time Processing LSI for Audio and Visual Data
  3. Reconfigurable Java Processor
  4. Multi-Thread Processor

Compression Methods of
Test Data and
Tester Interface

At the fabrication of LSI chips, we should generate very thin layers and lines, so it is hard to guarantee the correctness. So the test of all chips is necessary for the correctness in the fabrication, where test patterns are applied to all chips and their outputs are analyzed whether the response if correct or not. The test is rather time-consuming tasks and the number of test patterns is the main factor of the test time. We are working on the compression of test vectors and test methods for System on a Chip Design. We also working on the interfaces of testers.
  1. Compression of Test Vectors
  2. Analysis of Tester Languages

Past Research Themes


Last modified: 2004.03