Week In Review: Design, Low Power

Tools & IP
SiFive announced OpenFive, a self-contained and autonomous business unit that will offer custom silicon solutions with differentiated IP. OpenFive will be led by Dr. Shafy Eltoukhy, SVP, and general manager of OpenFive. OpenFive debuted with a new Die-to-Die (D2D) interface IP portfolio to serve next-generation chipset based designs for networking, HPC, and AI markets. The D2D portfolio is designed to provide a very low-latency controller to work with SerDes based connectivity between two dies and enable SoC architects to connect chip logic to optimized XSR/VSR/SR based SerDes along with native customer-defined interfaces, or Arm AMBA AXI.

Moortec announced the availability of its sensing fabric on TSMC’s N6 process technology. Moortec’s embedded sensing technology enables the assessment of key chip parameters both during production test and the measurement of real-time dynamic conditions during mission mode.

Rianta Solutions uncorked its new 800G MACsec IP core targeting ASIC and SoC devices. The fully-featured 1G to 800G channelized MACsec streaming processor cores support both LAN and WAN based Ethernet MACsec standards for ASIC, ASSP, and SoC designs and include a UVM verification environment and software API/SDK.

Deals
NSITEXE utilized Synopsys’ HAPS-80 prototyping solution to develop their current and next-generation Data Flow Processor (DFP) IP portfolio. NSITEXE’s RISC-V based accelerator has a complex 512-bit vector processing unit for vehicle control microcomputers. NSITEXE cited the ability to provide a pre-configured HAPS-80 system running their DFP processor IP.

Nuvoton deployed Cadence’s Palladium Z1 Enterprise Emulation Platform to accelerate the development of its microcontroller units (MCUs) for industrial and consumer applications. Using Cadence SpeedBridge Adapters, Nuvoton cited faster hardware and software integration, reducing OS boot-up simulation time from four days to 60 minutes compared to its legacy solution.

Clue Technologies adopted OneSpin’s coverage-driven assertion-based verification solution to enable implementation of critical safety flows that will allow Clue to sell safety-certified intelligent computing systems to aircraft manufacturers for high-performance video processing, high density storage, and multipoint hub for intensive data concentration. Clue will use the OneSpin 360 DV-Verify early in the verification flow to find bugs that have eluded the company’s simulation-only flow.

Synopsys said its IC Validator physical verification solution running on Microsoft Azure completed a verification run of the AMD Radeon Pro VII GPU, which includes more than 13 billion transistors, in less than nine hours. The collaboration was powered by Azure HBv2 virtual machines, using 2nd Generation AMD EPYC processors. Using elastic CPU management technology, IC Validator saw up to 40% savings in compute resources.

Arm announced a three-year partnership agreement with DARPA that establishes an access framework to all commercially available Arm technology, enabling the research community that supports DARPA’s programs to quickly and easily take advantage of Arm’s IP, tools, and support.

Imagination Technologies and RIOS Laboratory established a partnership, with Imagination opening up select GPU IP to the RISC-V International Open Source Laboratory (RIOS Lab). The collaboration supports PicoRio, the first RISC-V development platform released by the RIOS Lab. It will enable the RIOS Lab to build a complete development platform and open-source ecosystem, including high-quality GPU display and image processing, for RISC-V single-board computers.

Numbers
VeriSilicon landed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board (STAR Market) of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, China. VeriSilicon priced its IPO at RMB38.53 (~$5.6) per share. The offering raised approximately RMB1.86 billion (~$269M), giving the company a total market value of RMB18.6 billion (~$2.7B). When the stock market opened, VeriSilicon’s stock price increased to 150 RMB/share (~$21.7/share), an increase of 289%. VeriSilicon provides custom silicon design services and IP licensing. Funds raised from the IPO will focus on R&D, including for IP and SoCs focused on wearables, automotive, smart home, and smart cities.

Synopsys reported third quarter financial results with revenue of $964.1 million, up 13% from the same quarter last year. On a GAAP basis, income per share in Q3 2020 was $1.62, up 149.2% from $0.65 per share in Q3 2019. Non-GAAP income per share was $1.74, up 47.5% from $1.18 in the same quarter last year. “We saw double-digit revenue growth across all product groups and strength in all geographies,” noted chairman and co-CEO Aart de Geus.

People
Synopsys appointed Sassine Ghazi as Chief Operating Officer. Ghazi joined Synopsys in 1998 and most recently was general manager of Synopsys’ Design Group. Prior to Synopsys, he worked as a design engineer at Intel. He holds bachelor’s degrees in business administration and electrical engineering, and a Master of Science in electrical and computer engineering.

Rahul Goyal, vice president and director of R&D strategic enablement at Intel, has been re-elected to a one-year term as chairman of the board of directors of Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2).

Events
Find a new conference or learning opportunity at our events page, or check out an upcoming webinar.

Coming up soon is the 2^nd IEEE International Conference on AI Circuits and Systems. AICAS2020 will be held as a virtual event on Aug. 31—Sept. 4 and feature presentations on neuromorphic systems, accelerators, designing for edge applications, algorithms, and HW/SW co-design for AI.

On Sept. 3^rd, check out the RISC-V Global Forum (12am-6pm PT) to find out all the latest details about how the RISC-V ISA is being incorporated into diverse designs.

The ARC Virtual Processor Summit will take place Sept. 9-10 with a focus on automotive, edge AI, and high-performance embedded solutions.

Meanwhile, the Arm Research Summit will take place Sept. 9-11 with focuses on sustainability, data science, and security.

For some immediate learning, find out some techniques to predict failures and improve reliability with Ins And Outs Of In-Circuit Monitoring.