Category: Announcements

Post Contest

Thanks for your continued interest in this topic! Post contest, we provide the following materials to the community to stimulate further research efforts:

    • This link points to the presentation slides. More details though are covered in the actual presentation video found at this link.
    • This link points to the ISPD paper describing the contest. Follow-up papers are work in progress and will be posted here as well as soon as they become available.
    • This link points to the final-round release, including the benchmark baseline layouts, corresponding score sheets, and most of the official scripts. Please consider only this version for any further work (and not the sample or alpha-round release).
    • The two links aes and others point to the databases with official best results by the finalists, as obtained via final ranking. The databases contain the secured layout files from the finalists, the Trojan-infested GDS files from us, as well as related report files and score sheets, following the official scoring, from us. Many thanks to the finalists who agreed to share their secured layouts!
    • If you are interested in obtaining official final-round scores for your latest defense efforts, please contact us and we’re happy to provide you access to the submission and evaluation platform.
      (While you can run most parts for the official scoring locally, using the scripts provided in the final-round release, you need access to our platform for the important part of ECO Trojan insertion and related evaluation.)

Updates evaluation scripts and benchmarks

The alpha benchmarks release is updated. More details are given next. Please consider re-downloading the benchmarks suite at this point.

– v3.0, Feb 10 2023: Fix timing evaluation: drop latency.sdc files — these are only applicable for the baseline layouts, but not for any revision of the design by participants, and should thus not be considered ; related updates scripts/check.tcl; refactoring scripts/check.tcl into scripts/checks.tcl and scripts/PPA.tcl — the timing evaluation as previously implemented in scripts/check.tcl is deprecated as it’s inaccurate w/o latency.sdc files; related updates scripts/mmmc.tcl; related updates all timing, power, and scores report files

For your convenience, all prior submission are automatically re-evaluated. This means you don’t need to re-upload any submission (unless you have already deleted some from your Drive folder; then please re-upload those submissions you want to have re-evaluated.) You’ll receive related email notifications shortly.

You can expect that some submission that previously passed timing may now fail. This is expected and correct, as we have to ignore the latency values specified for the baseline layout for your revised submissions. You may just re-run your defense schemes without those latency values at your end, and then re-upload your accordingly fixed submissions, to probably pass timing again.

Further, the Q&A page is updated regularly. If you haven’t checked it recently, please visit https://wp.nyu.edu/ispd23_contest/qa/

Updates alpha round

The evaluation description has been updated. The main points are that PDN checks and pin placement checks are now active during constraints checking. The alpha benchmarks release is updated accordingly, that is the new scripts are shared.

There are further updates as well since the last announcement; the most important one is that PDN structures are revised, which impacts all design files and all report files. A summary of the updates is as follows:

– v1.3, Dec 28 2022: Added _scripts/check_pins.sh
– v1.4, Dec 29 2022: Updates _scripts/check_pins.sh; added related data files _alpha/*/reports/check_pins.DEF_orig.data; added headers to _scripts/ files
– v1.5, Dec 30 2022: Added _scripts/check_stripes_*_stylus.tcl; related and further updates _scripts/ files; added _alpha/*/reports/check_stripes.rpt and other example files; updates README files
– v2.0, Jan 04 2023: Revised PDN structures; related updates all design files and all report files
– v2.1, Jan 06 2023: Updated sha256 design files and report files; updates and code cleanups _scripts/check_pins.sh

Please re-download the alpha benchmarks suite at this point, from the same link as before.

Alpha round

There’s a minor update on the alpha round: All participants that submit, for each benchmark, some valid solutions which improve upon the baseline scores, move on the final round.

Recall that you can submit as many solutions as you which, and while all submissions are evaluated (and backed-up), only your currently best solutions will be considered for any ranking.