SOS Collaboration Platform: Powering The Next Discoveries In Physics

The world is on the cusp of some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in human history. The experiments physicists are carrying out today will shed new light on how our universe works. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a $10 billion project, unleashed a new perspective of how our universe works by letting us take a look at how tiny particles interact.

You can forgive the physicists working on the particle collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) campus for behaving like giddy little Einsteins after they managed to:

• Discovering the Higgs boson – touted as the ‘God’ particle that gives everything in our universe mass
• Discovery of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) – an exotic state of matter that produced coordinated shrapnel paths when protons collide with heavy ions which might unravel the traditional understanding of the Big Bang Theory
• Instigate an unfounded debate about how the LHC might create a black hole on earth – To keep the masses entertained, conspiracy theorists tagged the LHC as a Doomsday Machine.

Plus of course, dozens of other discoveries in particle physics.

However, no one talks about the underlying technology that powers the LHC.

The real power behind the Large Hadron Collider
Thousands of scientists collaborate at the CERN campus to make new discoveries on the LHC. The chips that are responsible for calibrating the collider are not just accurate, but they work in the harshest environments. They are bombarded with electromagnetic forces, thermal forces, and radiation every time someone hits the on switch. But that is not the biggest problem.

Collaborating effectively and managing the numerous versions of design data within the academic research environment across a number of universities and research institutes remains a challenge. The versatility of ClioSoft’s SOS7 design management platform and its support for a number of EDA tools from different vendors makes it possible for the LHC to collide protons. It also makes it possible for the physicists to record the results of these collisions.

Researchers can build complex SoC ecosystems fast with SOS
Having gone through a lot of proprietary tools to enhance collaboration between designers as well as IP reuse, the team of researchers at the LHC settled for the SOS7 Design Collaboration Platform from ClioSoft. This platform is an easily configurable platform that allows the LHC team to design SoC networks for their research and it also allows them to collaborate easily in a straight-forward manner accompanied with intelligent IP reuse at the campus.

Don’t be tempted to think it’s only CERN scientists who use our SOS Collaboration Platform. There are numerous research centers that rely on the SOS7 technology to enable development of next-generation technology.

CEA Leti, a global leader in the research of miniaturization technology used in low-energy IoT applications is another user of tools from ClioSoft to enable researchers to work harmoniously across different centers. Leti facilitates the entire chain of IoT development by offering components ranging from sensors that gather data to the processes that handle the manipulation of the data. Other research and academic institutions have followed suit, and today the University of Grenoble Alpes, major technology organizations across Europe and other academic institutions have signed up to explore the future.

The Imperial College in London, the University of Bonn, and the University of Barcelona are some of the notable academic establishments relying on the SOS7 Collaboration Platform. These institutions require custom IC applications for their high energy physics experiments. The application of the SOS Collaboration Platform helps these universities share findings, IP, and insight with the rest of the scientific community across Europe.

With this platform, making complex SoCs, with complex flows that allow worldwide IP sharing and reuse, is surprisingly easy. Researchers and research institutions no longer have to split the proverbial atom when designing custom SoC architectures. We have taken out the rocket science out of scalable SoC development.