View Proposal

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Proposer

Rob Stewart

Title

Monitoring protocol compliance of IP hardware blocks

Goal

Evaluate tool that generates hardware checkers

Description

Programmable hardware is increasingly used in many application areas, including Internet of Things and Smart devices, as well as safety critical systems. The correctness of hardware designs is therefore essential. When two hardware components communicate, they must do so via an agreed protocol. An example is the widely used AXI protocol. Many hardware designs are not open source, meaning you can use the generated IP hardware block from a vendor, but cannot verify its implementation by inspecting the hardware description code. How are you to trust a piece of hardware? So instead, one must inspect its communication behaviours to have confidence in its correctness. There is a tool called 'mbac', which generates hardware blocks from temporal properties that describe protocol rules. You can synthesise the generated hardware, meaning you can deploy it alongside closed source IP blocks, and it flags any time these properties are violated. This project will evaluate the mbac tool in terms of its usefulness for widely used protocol standards, its scalability to complex protocols, its effectiveness in catching hardware bugs, and potential practical deployment scenarios to make users aware of hardware bugs.

Resources

Background

Url

Difficulty Level

Challenging

Ethical Approval

None

Number Of Students

1

Supervisor

Rob Stewart

Keywords

Degrees