Sondrel claims modelling flow software cuts ASIC modelling to “a few days”
Detailed architectural modelling provides reasonable estimates of the performance, power, memory resources of an SoC, together with the network on chip (NoC) configuration that will be required, an indicative size of the die and what it is likely to cost. With this information, a customer can decide whether to proceed with the design, if it needs to be adjusted or even cancelled, explains Sondrel. The company has created proprietary modelling flow software, initially for use with Arm and Synopsys tools, that dramatically reduces the time to do this from months to a few days.
The enhanced architectural modelling provides customers with all the information that they need at the start of a project to understand all its aspects right through to cost per packaged, tested die, explained Graham Curren, Sondrel’s CEO.
“And, if we can use this with one of our predefined Architecting the future IP platforms for the customer’s design, we can reduce time, risk and costs even more dramatically,” Curren added.
Modelling tools are available as standard items from leading vendors but Sondrel wraps the vendor’s offerings with its own custom flow. The vendor’s tools are limited in terms of automation but the new modelling flow tool adds a framework with a greater number of settings that can be tweaked by the Sondrel systems architect who is working on the project. This is added using hooks into the vendor’s software. Typically, users create customisation wrappers that are specific to the designs that they work on if not already present in a library of an ever-growing number of such wrappers. Sondrel has defined a methodology and flows that can be used for almost any architectural exploration project.
The biggest benefit of the modelling flow’s dramatic reduction in the time it takes to create a model and run simulations, is that Sondrel can provide customers with data on the likely performance of a proposed ASIC in a matter of few days to determine if the architecture proposed gives an appropriate set of numbers. If not, it is very easy and quick to run variants of the model simply by changing the settings of the existing model to decide which is the best one for the customer’s application use case. Running each variation takes anywhere between a few minutes to an hour, so the whole process of model creation and running variants can still be done in the same timeframe.
