The platform, which is tightly coupled with Synopsys’ Fusion Design Platform, will provide visibility into critical performance, reliability and security issues for the entirety of a chip’s lifespan, providing new levels of insights for both SoC teams and their customers and provide the ability to optimise operational activities at each stage of the device and system lifecycles.
“Like so many other business domains today, the semiconductor industry now has the opportunity to further leverage empirical data about its products and technologies in order to achieve efficiencies across the electronics value chain, including at the system-level deployment stage,” said Sassine Ghazi, chief operating officer of Synopsys. “Building on our core expertise in IC design, our SLM platform provides a game-changing set of optimisation capabilities that extend throughout the entire lifecycle of IC design, production and deployment.”
The growing complexity of electronics systems is making quality and reliability increasingly difficult to achieve. This, coupled with little tolerance for performance degradation of any kind and the need to meet functional safety and security requirements, means that a new approach is needed to address how silicon-based systems are developed, operated and maintained.
The potential gains and cost savings in key applications like data centres and networking from improvements in performance and power could be measured in the billions of dollars. These savings can be achieved by properly managing each phase of a chip’s and system’s lifecycle from development through deployment to ensure optimised results throughout.
“Addressing critical chip performance and reliability issues is a multi-billion dollar issue that doesn’t stop at tape out. It requires a new way of looking at the entirety of how an IC is designed, built and used. Providing access to device data throughout the entire chip life span, and enabling on-going ‘in life’ feedback and optimisation through specialised analytics will allow a more efficient and effective way to address the semiconductor-related quality and security challenges system companies face in all industries,” said Richard Wawrzyniak, Principal Market Analyst: ASIC & SoC, Semico Research.
The Synopsys SLM platform is based on two underlying principles: gather as much useful data about each chip as possible and analyse that data throughout its entire lifecycle to gain actionable insights into improving chip and system related activities.
The first principle is achieved by expanding upon the data already available from test and product engineering with deep visibility into each chip’s operation through monitors and sensors that are embedded throughout each chip and measure targeted activities across a wide set of contexts and conditions. The second SLM platform principle is to apply targeted analytics engines that operate on available chip data to enable optimisations at each stage of the semiconductor lifecycle, starting with design implementation, and progressing through manufacturing, production test, bring-up and culminating with in-field operation.
