----Tom's Weekly Status Report---- Week of: 2011 May 06 Graduation day!!! I passed all of my finals, handed in the paper after my last (hopefully) review/markups. I still have to do the Micron directory documentation, but I should be done on Saturday. This has been an exciting project to work on. There have been quite a few epiphonies leading up to the grand conclusions. It's just too bad that it won't work out the way we had hoped. I hope that everyone in the group meets their wildest dreams out there in the real world. Thanks Ken and Tim for the extra time and effort in, what has been, a very insightful and challenging project. And thanks again for all of your guidance, dedication, and patience. Week of: 2011 April 29 Finals week has begun!! I'm not that excited, beleive me. I spent several hours trying to get the circuit to behave for the baseline simulation. HSIMplus ran to completion and I got a few waveforms out, but upon further examination, the current waveform was shunt to ground because I had an infinite value. HSpice won't run that value through, so at the end of that simulation, the output .lis file never was created. Therefore we couldn't see the waveforms on CosmoScope. All in all, it didn't work, BUT, we did find out that HSpice ran slower than HSIMplus by a significant amount even with the infinite calculations. So I guess we figured out a little something. Time to finish the paper! I hoped to be done with that already, but apparently not. Week of: 2011 April 22 Working with Mike on the 3x3 matrix multiplier. Originally, we tried to access the 3x3 matrix used by last years team but the files were write-protected. We tried to re-map the single-layer package model so that we could have all individual input and output waveforms through the package model along with the power and grounds for the baseline simulation. However, the re-mapping took us about 5 hours each to do and we weren't able to have any simulations complete at all. They all ended in errors. So we decided to keep my circuit simplifications that I used on all of the other Multi-Phase simulations. At the end of the day today, we spent about 9 hours each and couldn't get a working baseline simulation to complete without errors. I'll have to work on it next week sometime. Week of: 2011 March 25 Getting ready for the Presentation that is coming up after Spring Break. Lots of last-minute simulations need to be done on the Fibonacci circuits. HSIMplus simulations need to be done. having a practice presentation as a group tonight. Vander will not be able to make it. The simulations are taking a long time to complete (at least it is seeming that way). Longer than the simulation times that I have originally posted on my slides especially the HSpice simulation times. I don't have time to determine if that is a fluke or not before the presentation. Week of: 2011 February 25 I was able to simplify the package model by tying all of the outside power pins to each other and all of the outside ground pins together. The signal that I was trying to put in on only one pin was most likely being lost to mutual inductances and the signal was coming through to the inside of the package at only a fraction of what the input should have been. That has now been corrected. The simulations have been going well, I have simulated the inverter circuit and the adder circuit fully. I have begun the multiplier circuit and will be finishing it through the weekend (when I get time) and into next week. I should be able to get the results that I need for the rest of the circuits. Note: I should've guessed this beforehand, but simulation times are exceedingly longer when doing them at home remotely (approximately 3 times longer). So if anyone is curious about doing simulations from home, the simulation times will be incorrect. Week of: 2011 February 18 I talked with Ken about my difficulties that I have been having ad he has shown me my errors in getting a working inverter (how embarrasing, but I guess that's going to happen once in a while) into the package model for a varying signal such that I can find the nodes that I need to be measuring from. I also talked to Tim to re-itterate what he felt the need for the purposes of the current measurements off of the die model would serve, and he said that these currents would be used in place of the die on the package model so that we could do the multiple itterations on the circuit. The flow will be as follows: Run HSpice on the die model with ideal voltages --> Grab Currents from .lis file --> Create current model in place of die model inside the package model --> measure and grab varying (noisy) power and ground nodes --> use those for the non-ideal voltages on die model ... etc. Tim also reminded me to simplify the package model, which is something that Mike told me a while back but had forgotten with all of my frustration over not having the package model reflect the currents properly. Will be working on that over the weekend. By the way, Tim wants to be involved at the next team meeting, we need to conference him in. Week of: 2011 February 11 I've been having some trouble on the package model... What I have been trying to do is take the package, input a current signal onto the interior package power pins in order to measure the noisy voltage levels that occur. When I put a current souce onto those pins, however, I am not getting throughput measurements of the transient signal measurement. I've been trying to add resistances in parallel and series in order to try and measure those. But with no success. I'll probably need to get in touch with you Ken about this. Let me know if we could meet Wednesday sometime. In any case, I will keep trying different cases over the weekend and see if I can stumble onto something. Week of: 2011 February 4 Mike has been hard at work on the scripts and has asked me to get to work on the control files. I need to modify them in order to keep the scripting down to a minimum for each of the circuits that need to be run. We need to have similar terminal names for the measuring points for the current on the die models and similar terminal names for the current input and voltage output for the package model. I will need to begin separating the dies from the package models so we run the simulations in chunks. We aren't getting the current values we need to output into the .lis files, but have heard that MATLAB has a toolbox that will help with the extraction of those values that we need. Week of: 2011 January 21 This week, we got back on track after being on break. We met as a team about the project to see the status of each of the teams regarding their portion of the project. I searched specifically for information regarding the .tr0 binary output file from the HSPICE simulation of the package models. We also looked for documentation regarding HSPICE and how it uses particular files such as the .control file. There are a few questions that we had and we have sent those questions off to Ken for answering. We'll try and get with him next week sometime to discuss. Week of: 2010 November 12 This week, I conveyed all the information regarding the website to fellow team members. We have not, as of yet, recieved feedback from Tim Hollis about the proposal that was given to him (electronically and a hard copy). We may have to contact him this coming week to ask for that infomation if it is ready. We have pretty much decided from the meeting with Tim Hollis, that we would work on two main directions with the poroposed senior project. 1. to design a multi-phase approach 2. to utilize a possible alternative circuit to an ideal current souce for two-phase analysis. I have not been able to do much more with my portion at hand because of an agregious VLSI project that took approximately 60 hours of my time last week alone, and a test in another course. I plan on doing more with breaking down the output file for a circuit simulation using the two-phase approach to determine what the outputs are.