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ASIC, FPGA, and Verilog development.
3 published across 1 topics.
Hardware description languages and timing constraints.
Compare a large one-off engineering cost against a much lower cost per unit, and set the break-even volume from those two numbers. Then weight it with what a mistake costs: an FPGA is reprogrammable and ships sooner, an ASIC is smaller, faster and cheaper per part but a functional bug means a respin measured in months.
Read the slack to see how much time is missing, confirm the path is real and correctly constrained, then shorten it by restructuring or pipelining the logic and letting physical implementation close the rest. Lowering the clock frequency works but penalises the whole design, so it comes last.
A flop sampling a signal that changes near its clock edge can go metastable and hold an invalid level for an unbounded time. A second flop gives it a full period to settle, which fixes metastability but not cycle alignment, so a multi-bit bus needs a handshake or an asynchronous FIFO rather than a synchroniser per bit.