IP reuse and artificial intelligence were two of the major topics at this year’s IP SoC Santa Clara Conference and Exhibition, which took place earlier this month. Thalia’s CTO, Sowmyan Rajagopalan, speaking at the conference, outlined an innovative Reuse Platform as a Service (RePaaS) strategy, allowing analog IP providers to expand their product range and tailor offerings exactly to customer needs; while elsewhere speakers addressed the need for the analog design community to better serve emerging markets such as autonomous driving.
IP reuse and proliferation was a major topic of the conference. IP democratization is no longer a “nice-to-have”, but a “must”, to support the growth of complex SoC design and the new generation of protocols such as 5G, and emerging products such as LIDAR for autonomous vehicles and infrastructure for portable medical imaging. The event addressed the emergence of new business models and contracting processes, and the proliferation of IP, mostly for analog and mixed-signal block designs.
One of the many interesting presentations came from Seamless Microsystems, and was entitled “ADCs for Autonomous Driving”.
The company presented a number of advanced technologies for ADC IP based on a switched-mode signal processing approach.
The first generation of products to benefit will address the medical imaging and 4G/WiFi markets. The company already has silicon-proven devices in TSMC’s 28nm HPM process. The next generation of products is geared for the high bandwidth requirements needed for LIDAR, 5G wireless, and G.fast communication systems. They will potentially need to port it to various technologies and process nodes.
In tune with this theme of IP proliferation and reuse, Thalia’s CTO, Sowmyan Rajagopalan, outlined how our AMALIA design automation technology, combined with in-house analog design expertise and unique design flow methodology, offers an easy path to deploy and quickly diversify a wide portfolio of analog, mixed-signal and RF IP.
Sowmyan demonstrated an innovative approach to make Analog IP Reuse a reality based on robust and silicon validated design completions with customers.
Thanks to our reuse platform-as-a-service (RePaaS), Thalia is able to offer to the market a reliable and trusted solution that can also extend the generation of product variants and design enablement, allowing customers a fast deployment of numerous products.
You can download Sowmyan’s presentation here.
Other presentations at IP SoC 2019 made it clear that the move towards semiconductors for artificial intelligence and machine learning is now in full swing. Many companies are strongly considering both technologies. Indeed, the explosion in AI is inaugurating a new era for chip devices that will offer new scope but also new challenges: exemplified by Synopsys’s presentation entitled “Overcoming AI SoC Design Challenges with IP”. With AI, the number of new opportunities will be huge and more than 50 startups are now working to develop new AI chips with VC investments. Stay tuned!
The IP SoC 19 Santa Clara Conference & Exhibition is one of a series of events that bring together some of the leading minds in semiconductor IP, related applications and ecosystems, in Western Coast.
Delegates from different companies, large players, SMEs and startups, meet for one day of presentations, discussions and panels. The 2019 edition, which took place during the first week of April, was attended by around 150 visitors and 20 exhibitors.
