Altera Patent Grants

Voltage regulator with jitter control

Granted: December 25, 2018
Patent Number: 10164517
A voltage regulator package includes a voltage regulator module that outputs a voltage signal of a particular voltage level through an output terminal is provided. The voltage regulator module may be switched on according to a periodic signal having a periodic signal frequency as a variable. The periodic signal frequency may be tuned to reduce impedance, jitter, or noise.

Method and apparatus for performing large scale consensus based clustering

Granted: December 25, 2018
Patent Number: 10162924
A method for designing a system on a target device includes identifying a candidate cluster for a node in the system based on a gain value that quantifies utility for the candidate cluster. The candidate cluster is designated as a final cluster for the node when the candidate cluster has a highest gain value among other candidate clusters for each node in the candidate cluster.

Speculative circuit design component graphical user interface

Granted: December 18, 2018
Patent Number: 10157250
In one embodiment, a tangible, non-transitory, computer-readable medium, includes instructions to receive a first circuit design, determine one or more variations of the first circuit design using register retiming with speculative circuit design changes, determine one or more performance improvements of the variations when fed clock signals over the first circuit design, determine one or more tradeoffs of the one or more variations of the first circuit design in comparison to the first…

Constraint based bit-stream compression in hardware for programmable devices

Granted: December 11, 2018
Patent Number: 10152566
A programmable logic device such as an integrated circuit may receive user-defined configuration data from a circuit design system. The user-defined configuration data may include a minimal number of user-defined configuration variables necessary to configure the programmable logic device when combined with hardware-defined configuration variables generated in resolution engines in the programmable logic device based on the user-defined configuration variables. The resolution engines may…

Methods for performing register retiming operations into synchronization regions interposed between circuits associated with different clock domains

Granted: December 11, 2018
Patent Number: 10152565
Circuit design computing equipment may perform register retiming operations to improve the performance of a circuit design after having performed placement and routing operations. For example, the circuit design computing equipment may perform register retiming operations that move registers from a first portion of a circuit design that operates in a first clock domain into a synchronization region that separates the first portion of the circuit design from a second portion of the…

Method and apparatus for designing a system using weighted-cost interconnect synthesis

Granted: December 4, 2018
Patent Number: 10146898
A method for generating a design for a system implemented on a target device includes presenting a user with an interface that allows the user to weight objectives for an interconnect architecture of the design. The interconnect architecture is generated in response to weighted objectives provided by the user.

Adaptive rate-matching first-in first-out (FIFO) system

Granted: December 4, 2018
Patent Number: 10146249
A control system controls First-In First-Out (FIFO) settings of a receiving system. The control system includes a FIFO settings controller that receives a first signal indicative of a first frequency of data received by the receiving system. The FIFO settings controller receives a second signal indicative of a second frequency of a clock that reads the data received by the receiving system. The FIFO settings controller determines a difference (e.g., a parts-per-million (PPM) difference)…

Method and apparatus for performing parallel routing using a multi-threaded routing procedure

Granted: November 27, 2018
Patent Number: 10140411
A method for designing a system to be implemented on a target device, the method including generating bounding boxes on the target device for nets in the system where a bounding box identifies routing resources available for routing a corresponding net in the bounding box. The nets in the system are assigned to a plurality of threads to be routed. The threads are executed so that a plurality of the nets are routed in parallel within their corresponding bounding box.

Secure physically unclonable function (PUF) error correction

Granted: November 27, 2018
Patent Number: 10142102
An integrated circuit having a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) circuit is provided. The PUF circuit may reside as part of a secure subsystem, which also includes a random number generator, a syndrome generator, non-volatile memory, and control circuitry. A predetermined syndrome of a desired PUF response is stored in the non-volatile memory. During normal operation, a current PUF response may be read out from the PUF circuit. The current PUF response may include erroneous bits that…

Pipelined interconnect circuitry with double data rate interconnections

Granted: November 27, 2018
Patent Number: 10141936
An integrated circuit may have pipelined interconnects that are configurable to operate in registered single data rate mode, registered double data rate mode, or in combinational mode. The pipelined interconnect may include routing multiplexers for selecting incoming signals, circuitry for serialization and de-serialization, and memory elements that are configurable to store one or two signals per clock period. Operating the pipeline interconnects in double data rate mode may provide a…

Integrated circuits with specialized processing blocks for performing floating-point fast fourier transforms and complex multiplication

Granted: November 27, 2018
Patent Number: 10140091
Integrated circuits with specialized processing blocks are provided. A specialized processing block may include one real addition stage and one real multiplier stage. The multiplier stage may simultaneously feed its output to the addition stage and directly to an adjacent specialized processing block. The addition stage may also produce sum and difference outputs in parallel. A group of four such specialized processing blocks may be connected in a chain to implement a radix-2 fast…

Methods and apparatus for performing buffer fill level controlled dynamic power scaling

Granted: November 20, 2018
Patent Number: 10136384
Integrated circuits with wireless communications circuitry are provided. The wireless communications circuitry may include an input FIFO, an output FIFO, a processing module interposed between the input and output FIFOs, and dynamic power control circuitry that controls the performance of the processing module. The input and output FIFOs may provide fill level information to the processing module. The dynamic power control circuitry may analyze the current fill level information received…

Flexible physical function and virtual function mapping

Granted: November 20, 2018
Patent Number: 10133594
Techniques and mechanisms provide a flexible mapping for physical functions and virtual functions in an environment including virtual machines.

Multi-rate transceiver circuitry

Granted: November 13, 2018
Patent Number: 10129013
Techniques to operate circuitry in an integrated circuit are provided. The circuitry may include rate detection circuitry, receiver circuitry, and configuration circuitry. The receiver circuitry may receive a data stream with an arbitrary data rate. The rate detection circuitry may receive a reference clock signal that is associated with the received data stream. The rate detection circuitry determines the frequency of the reference clock signal such that an appropriate clock signal may…

Methods and devices for reducing clock skew in bidirectional clock trees

Granted: November 13, 2018
Patent Number: 10128850
The present disclosure provides systems and methods for improving operation of integrated circuit device including a logic region, which includes a plurality of logic gates that operate based at least in part on a clock signal to facilitate providing a target function, and a clock tree, which includes a clock switch block that receives a source clock signal from a clock source and a branch communicatively coupled between the clock switch block and the logic region, in which the branch…

Selectable reconfiguration for dynamically reconfigurable IP cores

Granted: November 13, 2018
Patent Number: 10127341
Systems and methods for reconfiguration of a hardened intellectual property (IP) block in an integrated circuit (IC) device are provided. Reconfiguration of the hardened IP block in the IC device may transition between functions supported by the hardened IP block. A transition may occur as a pre-configured profile is selected to reconfigure the hardened IP block. Further, configuration data associated with each of the pre-configured profiles of the hardened IP block may be generated and…

Hybrid programmable many-core device with on-chip interconnect

Granted: November 13, 2018
Patent Number: 10127190
The present invention provides a hybrid programmable logic device which includes a programmable field programmable gate array logic fabric and a many-core distributed processing subsystem. The device integrates both a fabric of programmable logic elements and processors in the same device, i.e., the same chip. The programmable logic elements may be sized and arranged such that place and route tools can address the processors and logic elements as a homogenous routing fabric. The…

Specialized processing blocks with fixed-point and floating-point structures

Granted: November 13, 2018
Patent Number: 10127013
Integrated circuits with specialized processing blocks that can support both fixed-point and floating-point operations are provided. A specialized processing block of this type may include partial product generators, compression circuits, and a main adder. The main adder may include a high adder, a middle adder, a low adder, floating-point rounding circuitry, and associated selection circuitry. The middle adder may include prefix networks for outputting generate and propagate vectors,…

Global variable optimization for integrated circuit applications

Granted: November 6, 2018
Patent Number: 10120969
Systems and methods for generating and deploying integrated circuit (IC) applications are provided. Global variable implementation logic may be used to optimize implementation, on an integrated circuit, of functionality represented by high-level code including global variables. A compiler's intermediate representation is analyzed for one or more characteristics that may be used to determine one or more initialization parameters, one or more scope parameters, one or more implementation…

Integrated circuit with overdriven and underdriven pass gates

Granted: November 6, 2018
Patent Number: 10121534
In one embodiment, an integrated circuit includes a pass gate circuit and a memory element circuit. The pass gate circuit receives a user signal that toggles between a high voltage level and a low voltage level. The memory element circuit outputs a control signal to control the pass gate circuit. The control signal may be asserted to be greater than the high voltage level when activating the pass gate circuit or the control signal may be deasserted to be less than the low voltage level…