JasperGold® Clock Domain Crossing App (CDC)

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Contents

• Overview of CDC and the RAK

• Lab Exercise – Download the complete kit from attachment section of this article.
• Summary

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Clock Domain Crossing Overview

• Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) occurs when a signal crosses from one asynchronous clock
domain to another.
CLKA Domain
Clock Domain CLKB Domain
Crossing
B_reg B2_reg
A_reg
D Q D Q
SIG_A D Q SIG_B CLKB

CK CK A_reg/Q
CK R R
R
SIG_B
CLKA CLKB

if CLKA & CLKB are Non-deterministic relationship

asynchronous between the clocks causes them Flop output goes to metastable
to skew continuously resulting in state which eventually settles to a 1
setup/hold violations or 0 after an unpredictable delay
CLKA

CLKB

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Clock Domain Crossing Problem and Solution

Problem
• Need an efficient way to identify the crossings and make sure the CDC issues
are being covered
• Need an easy-to-use interface to debug the violations and identify the root
cause
• Need to avoid reporting “noise” in the analysis

Solution
• New CDC App that is easy to use, meets all CDC verification challenges, and
has extensive debug capabilities
• Goes beyond the structural checks, doing functional and metastability analysis
• Flexible rule configuration and user-defined schemes specification
• Use formal technology to automatically waive “noisy” violations

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Rapid Adoption Kit

• Provides a brief tour of CDC capabilities

• Walks through the CDC phases
– CDC configuration
– Structural analysis
– Functional analysis
• Provides a set of files and specific instructions for running a basic example

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What JasperGold CDC App Checks

Missing/wrong Multiple
sync Issue synchronization CDC protocol
paths Issue

Metastability
Effects

• Structural violations Re-convergence

Logic in the
– Missing synchronizers crossing Issue
– Structural glitch
– Convergent/Divergent/Re-convergent design structures
Reset domain
• CDC protocol violations crossings Logic in the sync
– Synchronization scheme-specific transfer protocol related issues chain

• Data coherency issues

– Re-convergence related problems
• Reset related violations

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JasperGold CDC App Flow

CDC
1. CDC configuration Configuration
– CDC intent setup including
– Clocks and resets, clock association of ports
– Clock domain manipulation
– Signal configuration
– CDC rules
– User-defined & custom schemes Structural
Analysis
2. Structural analysis
– Standard synchronization schemes detection
– Structural CDC rule checks
– Automatic identification of convergence/re-convergence issues
Functional
3. Functional checks Checks
– Automatically generate and prove CDC protocol checks
– Export protocol checks to simulation

4. Metastability modeling & injection

Metastability
– Metastability effect modeling & injection
Analysis
– Validate user-defined properties in formal environment
– Validate test cases in simulation environment

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Structural Checks

• no_scheme
– Crossing is not correctly synchronized
• cdc_pair_logic
– Logic in the crossing
• cdc_pair_fanout
– Crossing same data on more than one path
• sync_chain_logic
– Logic in the synchronization scheme
• sync_chain_fanout
– Semi-synchronized data on more than one path
• different_reset
– Flops using different asynchronous reset signals
• Convergence/Reconvergence/Glitches

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Functional Checks

• Stability
– Data or control should be stable for at least one full clock cycle on the destination domain
• Grey encoding
– FIFO addressing should be done using grey encoding
• Reads and writes on FIFO
– Empty or full restriction
• Handshake properties
– Req and Ack protocol

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Requirements for Running the RAK Lab Exercise

• Required product versions:

– JasperGold 2017.12 (or later)
NOTE: This lab has been checked with versions 2017.12, 2018.03 and 2018.06
• Requires licenses:
–jasper_interactive and jasper_cdc
or
– jasper_pint and jasper_papp

• Follow directions in JasperGold Clock Domain Crossing App Rapid Adoption

Kit.pdf which is included in the CDC_RAK.tgz

10 © 2018 Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Summary

• JasperGold CDC App detects the CDC issues in the design earlier in the flow.
• CDC helps designers and verification engineers perform the CDC verification
faster in a more structured way.
• CDC goes beyond structural checks:
– Protocol checks generations
– Metastability analysis
– Intelligent waiver mechanism reduces noise
• CDC provides advanced analysis and debugging capabilities:
– Integrated Graph + Schematic Viewer
– Specialized Visualize™ debug
– Smart report capabilities

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