Below you will find item we hope are of interest to people involved in SoC Labs developments. If you have something to share please add an item or if you have an idea for an item you would like to see then let us know.

News

Article
Introduction to SoC Design - Course sign up

SoC Design is a complex process. A helpful resource that can help SoC noobs make their first steps towards a design is the "Introduction to SoC Design" course offered by Arm education media. 

If your institution is already a member of the Arm Academic Access programme, you can obtain free access to the course materials. The only prerequisite is that you should have already signed the AAA agreement.

To obtain access to the course:

Article
Copyright © eFutures. A UKRI Funded Network 2022. All rights reserved.

eFutures Conference 2022

A few weeks ago, we had a chance to meet researchers from around the United Kingdom to share our work and bring the community together.  

eFutures is a researcher network which aims to support people researching and working with electronic systems across the UK, bringing people together and igniting a spark for collaboration across the globe. eFutures is mainly funded by UK's EPSRC funding body and thanks to their support we were able to present a SoC workshop to the delegates. 

eFutures is a UKRI Funded Network

Article
Copyright © 2022 SoC Labs. All rights reserved.

Manage your project with Git for full version control

Good project management requires careful tracking of multiple entries by the project contributors. Git is a well-known version control mechanism to integrate into your production flow. Git was initially coded by Linus Torvalds, for his Linux kernel development, who was frustrated by other distributed version control systems. Git supports full-version tracking with history without requiring network access. Git has been adopted by many projects since 2005.

Article
Organise your project file structure to make project management easier

There are many things to keep control of when creating and then maintaining a successful SoC project. If we consider all factors and stages of a project's life, it contains a considerable amount of data; previous reusable IPs/project data, imported custom IP/data from new ideas, system level data for gluing logic, etc. Hardware design is complicated enough, and full microprocessor based SoC device fabrications are quite challenging. David has a great post about an Arm Cortex-M0 based SoC project (Arm Cortex-M0 microcontroller | SoC Labs).

Article
Copyright © 1995-2021 Arm Limited (or its affiliates). All rights reserved.

First Voyage of Arm Academic Access (AAA)

Welcome to SoC Labs. I would like to share my first journey in using the Arm Academic Access (AAA) IP. In this post, I hope to show,  how to register, how to connect Arm servers and what may be useful to download as the first steps. You may find some of the screenshots useful. Here is a quick review: 

Article

Lance Draper, creates a sharing environment for Arm Academic Access

Arm Academic Access (AAA) adds some extra development environment requirements but is also an opportunity to take fresh look at how you support your hardware development activities. At the University of Southampton we had systems in place to support our Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools for education and research but AAA allowed us to put in place an improved environment for sharing among the team.

Article
Dr Basel Halak / © 2021 University of Southampton

Physically Unclonable Functions, design, evaluation and application

Dr Basel Halak, National Teaching Fellow and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, presents an in depth tutorial on the implementation of Physically Unclonable Functions and their applications in security of hardware devices.

Article
Energy harvesting IoT needs a specialized virtual prototyping framework
IoT’s energy problems

To realize the scale of device deployments as envisioned by the Internet of Things (IoT), we inevitably face the issue of how these numerous “Things” are to be powered. In the case of many smart appliances, for example your Philips Hue bulbs or Amazon Echo Dot, this is a non-issue since these devices are connected to mains power. The same may be said for battery-powered appliances, such as smart watches and fitness bands, where recharging or replacing a battery is easy and convenient.

Article
Tim Daulby wins Best Pitch Video Award at ENSsys 2020

Tim Daulby has won an award for presenting his work on intermittent computing at ENSsys 2020, the 8th International Workshop on Energy Harvesting & Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems.

Tim's paper, entitled ''Exploring NVM technologies through the lens of intermittent computation'', evaluated emerging non-volatile memory technologies across a number of metrics. It explored their impact on the design of intermittent computing devices.

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