Course Overview
Functional verification course for freshers is a 8 months course structured to enable students gain in depth exposure to all the aspects of VLSI design and functional verification. It is one of the exhaustive courses among the courses offered by various institutes.
VLSI design and verification course prepares the fresher on all the essential aspects of VLSI front end domain including ASIC flow, advanced digital design, CMOS, SOC design and verification concepts, Verilog, System Verilog, UVM, Linux, version control and scripting. Course also includes training on soft skill for effective interview performance.
Lack of fundamentals in advanced digital design, Analog design and Verilog for design & verification becomes a major deterrent for freshers in finding right career opportunities. VLSI design and verification course offered in both classroom and online mode ensures that fresher is empowered with all the essential skill set required for various job roles in VLSI front end domain. VLSI design and verification course is practical oriented with each aspect of course involving multiple hands on projects. Student progress is tracked using 75 detailed assignments covering all the aspects from digital design, VLSI flow, SOC design & verification, RTL coding, Verilog, System Verilog, RTL debug, UNIX, and PERL/Python scripting.
Advanced Digital Design course focus on all the digital design concepts including combinational logic, sequential logic, circuit design concepts, memory types and other essential things focused in majority of fresher interviews. Course assume minimal exposure to digital design concepts, it starts from basic concepts till advanced concepts including clock domain crossing, synchronisers, timing violation fixing, etc.
Verilog and RTL coding course focus on all Verilog language constructs from practical usage perspective. Training involves 25+ design coding examples focused in fresher interviews.
Systemverilog course gives fresher with required exposure to advanced functional verification concepts. All language constructs are covered with detailed coding examples involving more than 200 examples. Course also offers exposure to standard on-chip communication protocols and verification IP development for AXI. UVM essentials course will emphasis on UVM language constructs and UVC development for AHB Protocol.
RTL debug course will focus on training student with important debug concepts including schematic tracing, RTL tracing, RTL & TB coding issues, etc.
Linux OS course ensures that student gets accustomed to industry work environment. Training also includes exposure to Makefile, revision management and all essential UNIX concepts.
Scripting course will focus PERL essential concepts. It will help student gain exposure to file management, regular expressions, Object oriented PERL, PERL modules and PERL usage in industry. Soft skill training will prepare student on how to face interviews effectively, right body language, etc.
VLSI design and verification course is also targeted for engineers working in non-VLSI domains and planning to make career in VLSI.
Students planning to pursue complex projects after this course can do by paying a nominal fee. Institute offers more than 30+ other projects based on industry standard protocols like USB3.0, PCIe, UFS, SATA, DDR, DMA, AMBA, Bridge and Ethernet MAC etc.
Please note, ‘VLSI Functional verification training’, ‘VLSI front end training for freshers’ and ‘VLSI design and verification training for freshers’ are all same courses and refer to the current course you are seeing.
Projects are the most significant part of any engineers(both fresher and experienced) resume. Every resume will by default have Verilog, SV and UVM. It is the projects that differentiate your resume from other resumes, which essentially helps your chances of getting through the interviews.
Below is the list of projects student will be doing as part of six months training. Student will be doing all these projects from scratch. These projects will provide student with expertise on par with a 2 to 3 years experienced engineer, in terms of all the skill set required. Student can work on additional projects to enhance resume for experienced job role.
By working on below projects, student will get familiar with:
- majority of standard protocols(AXI, AHB, APB, SPI, I2C, UART, etc)
- Industry standard simulation tools like Questasim & VCS
- Gain debug expertise
- RTL coding and TB development
Ethernet MAC is MAC core with transmit and receive logic working at 100Mbps. Design consists of five sub modules including DMA controller, MII, transmit, receive and control module. Course also covers the MAC 802.3 protocol standard.
This project provides student with detailed exposure to complete functional verification flow starting from reading the specification till coverage report generation and regression analysis. Student will get exposure to regression setup, coverage analysis and scoreboard development. This project is also good for working professionals whose work is generally confined to limited aspects of verification flow and want to get quick hands on exposure to complete flow.
What student learns from this project:
- Understand various 802 standards and more specifically 802.3 standard
- Understand various layers in OSI reference model and significance of network layer and MAC layer.
- Understand the whole process of functional verification flow starting from Specification to coverage analysis and closure.
- Ethernet MAC Specification detailed overview
- Design specification
- Listing down features, scenarios
- Developing testplan
- Testbench architecture
- Testbench component coding
- Functional coverage coding
- Register model coding and integration
- Assertion development
- Testbench component integration
- Sanity Testcase coding
- Functional Testcase coding
- Regression setup using Python
- Regression debug
- coverage report generation and analysis
AXI3.0 is an AMBA protocol used for high performance applications. AXI3.0 supports various features like out of order transactions, burst transfers, cacheble and bufferable transactions few among various features supported.
VIP was developed to work as both master and slave. Developed all the VIP components and validated VIP for various AXI features.
What student learns from this project:
- Develop VIP Architecture to be compatible with both master and slave behavior
- List down AXI features and develop testplan for validating AHB VIP
- Develop AXI VIP components
- Integrated AXI Master VIP with slave VIP
- Develop sanity testcases and debug the same
- Develop functional tests and debug the same
- Regression setup and closing of VIP validation using coverage criteria
Memory testbench was setup for configurable number of agents. Implemented the concept of semaphores to avoid the conflict from multiple agent concurrent access. Also developed reference model and checker to check memory write read behaviour. This project was done to gain practical exposure to System Verilog language constructs.
What student learns from this project:
- Develop TB Architecture to be compatible with configurable number agent.
- List down design features and develop testplan
- Develop and integrate TB components.
- Develop sanity testcases and debug the same
- Develop functional tests and debug the same
FIFO is a design block used for connecting components working at either same or different frequencies. This project covers all the UVM TB setup for asynchronous FIFO. This project is focused on teaching UVM constructs from practical usage perspective.
What student learns in this project:
- Understand the functionality of Synchronous and Asynchronous FIFO
- Understand how to fix clock domain crossing issues in Asynchronous FIFO due to design working in two different clock domains, to avoid race and glitch conditions
- Develop Synchronous and Asynchronous FIFO design using Verilog
- Develop Test bench for Synchronous and Asynchronous FIFO design using Verilog
- Understand how to setup UVM TB for a design with 2 master interface
- Get hands on exposure to all UVM constructs
- Listing down features, scenarios – useful for interviews
- Develop test bench architecture using virtual sequencer
- Develop write and read interface agents
- Integrate both agents to the test bench
- Implement various test cases
- How to use virtual sequencer and virtual sequences in test case coding
- Regression setup and coverage analysis
SPI Controller is design block that acts as an interface between processor and SPI slaves. SPI architecture is based on one master and multiple slaves.
SPI controller has 2 interfaces, one is APB interface used for configuring the SPI registers, address and data, other is SPI interface used for connecting with SPI slaves. SPI uses SCLK, MOSI, MISO and CS to connect master to slave.
What student learns from this project:
- SPI protocol, architecture, components, signals
- SPI timing diagram – writes, reads
- SPI controller verilog coding
- SPI controller test bench development and test case coding
Interrupt is an important aspect of processor and peripheral communication in any SOC. This project focused on learning Interrupt controller verilog coding and TB development.
What student learns from this project:
- Understand the important of Interrupt in an SOC
- Understand how the interrupt logic works in processor and peripheral communication
- Develop the Interrupt controller architecture with processor and peripheral interfacing
- Develop the Verilog code for Interrupt controller
- Learn the concept of setting up test bench for complex design
- Develop different test cases for various interrupt handling possibilities
Memory is developed using DEPTH, WIDTH and SIZE parameters to implement a configurable memory. The design and Test bench developed in Verilog language with multiple testcases. This project is focused on learning Verilog from practical use case perspective.
What student learns from this project:
- Develop memory verilog code with different parameters
- Understand memory using KB, MB, GB format. Learning calculations for Address Width calculation
- Develop TB Architecture using front door and back door access tasks
- Learn the concept of task usage in configurable test bench setup
- Learn the concept of testcases in design verification
- How to analyze the waveform for checking memory write/reads
- Develop functional tests and debug the same
PISO(Parallel In Serial Out) and SIPO (Serial In Parallel Out) are required for Serialising and De-serialising data at PHY interface. These has two interfaces for data driving from parallel interface on one side to serial interface on another side and vice versa. It collects the serial incoming data and pushes in to shift register and drives it out to upper layers as a parallel data. It collects parallel incoming data from upper layers and drives it on serial interface. Design also includes buffer to achieve non-blocking data transfers in both transmit and receive paths.
What student learns from this project:
- RTL Coding for both transmit and receive paths
- RTL integration
- Setting up Testbench and testbench component coding.
- Testplan development
- Testcase coding
CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) is an important concept in VLSI high speed protocols. This project is focused on learning the CRC generation logic for a bit vector using the standard CRC polynomials for CRC5, CRC16 and CRC32.
What student learns from this project:
- Understand the purpose of CRC in high speed protocols
- Understand the logic used in CRC calculation, and how it differs from binary division logic
- Develop the Verilog code for the CRC calculation
- Develop TB for CRC logic checking
Clock is important aspect of every electronic design. This project focused on understanding clock generation for a user provided frequency, duty cycle and jitter.
What student learns from this project:
- Understand the important of clock in electronic designs
- Understand how to convert frequency to time period, Hz/KHz/MHz/GHz to sec/ms/us/ns/ps
- Develop the Verilog code for clock generation using user provided frequency, duty cycle and jitter
- Learn usage of $value$plusargs for reading user arguments
- Learn usage of $value$plusargs for reading user arguments
- Develop TB for clock generation logic checking
- Understand importance of time step in clock generation logic
- RTL coding and verification of Dynamic pattern detector and overlapping & non-overlapping pattern detector
- RTL coding and verification of Dual port RAM
- Parameterizable full adder