By Bastien Gratréaux, Project and MARCOM Lead, Defacto Technologies
During the past few years, we observed that SoC Design should be oriented to be seen as a commodity. A strong demand around SoC compilation is occurring in particular at front-end level. Several major semiconductor companies confirmed that the first versions of SoC should be available “at the glance”. New actors (mainly from software world) start to appear in the market and are part of such new need in terms of press button SoC generation. The strongest need is the ease of access and use of EDA tools so we keep believing that the trend from 2023 will be oriented around the cloud and even if we talk about this for now several years.
To reach such automation and accelerating the process of SoC creation requires that EDA design tools provide a much higher degree of automation to manage design information very early in the design process and at Defacto, we believe it requires a unique and new breakthrough methodology to manage unified design formats. Indeed, all design information, including functional design (RTL), architecture (IP-XACT), timing constraints (SDC), power intent (UPF), physical (LEF/DEF), must be taken into consideration together and as early as possible in the SoC build process.
