Chip Data Joins The Party

Perhaps you’ve heard of silicon lifecycle management (product lifecycle management for your semiconductor) but considered it a “far-future” practice that you can safely ignore for now. While many pieces of a complete silicon lifecycle solutions (SLS) are not yet in place, the components are coming together every day.

Today, in fact, Siemens’ Tessent offers a new suite of software services that helps our customers use silicon lifecycle management data in their existing software workflows and data infrastructure. Called the Tessent Host Services solution, the software fills a key gap facing SLS early adopters—the need to extract data from SLS-enabled chips and use that data in existing flows and enterprise software systems. An SLS-enabled chip contains Embedded Analytics silicon IP that can monitor, analyze, and export on-chip data. The big question until now has been, “export it how and where?” The new Host Services software provides answers.

For chips enabled with the functional monitoring and analysis capabilities of Siemens’ Tessent Embedded Analytics IP and software, Host Services software opens the lines of communication with your chip and brings SLS one step closer to reality.

What can you do with Host Services solution?

Host Services is perfect for workflows that are script-based, programmatic environments taking advantage of proprietary and open-source software (OSS) libraries and standard data analysis tools. It lets you access functional monitoring data from the chip in a standard interchange format such as JSON or via a Linux pipe. It provides the connectivity to efficiently bring high volumes of Tessent Embedded Analytics data off-chip at speed, to pass that data into a database of your choice and to process it as needed.

There is also an API that allows run-time configuration of the full range of Embedded Analytics hardware monitors: embedded logic analyzers, memory monitors, protocol-aware monitors for interconnects and networks, and more. It could be used for system validation before deployment, for system testing in device farms, and with continuous development and integration.

The Tessent Host Services solution addresses the emerging need to apply product lifecycle management (PLM) principles to the semiconductor value chain. Advancing silicon lifecycle solutions enables a new phase of growth and development in semiconductors and so that the industry keeps its place at the heart of innovation for the next generation of products and technology. The combination of EDA and PLM under Siemens has given rise to new enterprise solutions that break down the barriers between engineering silos.