A few days distant from its $4.8 billion IPO, Arm is looking to convince the market and its partners and customers that it is locked in on the latest evolution in chip design and manufacturing. The company this week launched a new chip design approach that aligns with a range of ecosystem partners and their resources to enable fast, customized chip production based on Arm designs.
Arm Total Design, unveiled at the 2023 Open Compute Project Global Summit, builds on the company’s August launch of its Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS) platform, which itself was designed to provide customers with pre-integrated and validated configurations of Arm Neoverse platforms targeted at a variety of use cases, with the ultimate aim of reducing development cost and improve time-to-market. Total Design is not a product, but an ecosystem-driven model that brings together ASIC design houses, IP vendors, EDA tool providers, foundries, and firmware developers to accelerate and simplify the development of customized system-on-a-chip solutions and chiplets using Neoverse CSS-based systems.
In announcing Arm Total Design, Mohamed Awad, SVP and GM, Infrastructure Line of Business at Arm, said the ecosystem partners aligning with Arm in this case “will benefit from preferential access to Neoverse CSS, enabling them to innovate, drive rapid time-to-market, and lower the cost and friction of building custom silicon for everyone.”
He added, “We’re engaging critical ecosystem expertise at every stage of SoC development to make specialized solutions based on Arm Neoverse widely available across the infrastructure, including AI, cloud, networking, edge, and more.”
The ecosystem offering includes:
• Pre-integrated, validated IP and EDA tools from partners like Alphawave Semi, Cadence, Rambus, and Synopsys to help accelerate silicon design and the integration of things like memory, security, and peripherals
• Design services from partners including ADTechnology, Broadcom, Capgemini, Faraday, Socionext, and Sondrel, who are ready to support the ecosystem with expertise on Neoverse CSS, other Arm IP and methodology
• Technology optimized for leading-edge process nodes and advanced packaging techniques from foundry partners, including Intel Foundry Services and TSMC
• Commercial software and firmware support for Neoverse CSS from leading infrastructure firmware providers like AMI
The whole approach arrives as chip design and manufacturing by necessity is becoming less focused on relentless performance, footprint, and power advancements, and more about helping customers develop the exact right chip for their own, often AI-driven use cases. Delivering on that vision could introduce a host of complications along the semiconductor supply chain, and that is why Arm is looking to streamline it by ecosystem members on the same page and as prepared as possible.
Awad said, “Arm Total Design means that ASIC design houses can have designs started and on-the-shelf ready to go, IP vendors can pre-integrate, pre-validate, and pre-optimize advanced IP for Neoverse CSS, EDA partners can ensure seamless support into the most advanced tools and flows in order to streamline SoC design, commercial firmware solutions can be developed long before silicon availability, and Neoverse CSS designs will be specifically optimized to take advantage of leading-edge process nodes.”