IBM recognises pioneering work in SoC project

A project successfully completed for Broad Reach Engineering has led to Synopsys winning IBM's prestigious Beacon Award for the best IBM Power Architecture solution.

Synopsys has won IBM's prestigious Beacon Award for the best IBM Power Architecture solution.

Beacon Award entries were judged by a panel of senior IBM managers and technical specialists from the industry.

Synopsys was nominated by a customer, Broad Reach Engineering, for a system-on-chip (SoC) project involving Synopsys' DesignWare Star intellectual property (IP) PowerPC 440-S core and Synopsys Professional Services.

The Synopsys solution helped Broad Reach Engineering achieve significant improvements in system performance, development cost, time to market and test development time.

"Broad Reach Engineering wants to provide a seamless hardware platform to take advantage of an extensive PowerPC software infrastructure, but variations among standard commercial parts do not always allow us to meet the environmental and schedule requirements for our space-based systems", said Chris McCormick, CEO at Broad Reach Engineering.

"We worked with Synopsys Professional Services to implement the PowerPC 440-S core in a radiation tolerant process technology to reliably meet these requirements".

"The embedded processor solution that Synopsys' consultants implemented resulted in an SoC that increased our system performance while maintaining cycle-for-cycle compliance with the commercially available parts".

"This allowed us to use our proven software and significantly reduced our product development time".

Working with IBM, Synopsys redesigned the original RTL source code to make it fully synthesisable and modified the processor's cache memory system to replace custom-designed memories with commonly available on-chip RAM (SRAM) components.

These steps eliminate major process portability barriers and make the Power Architecture available to all SoC designers independent of the process technology they choose to use.

In addition, the PowerPC 4xx-S Design Views (simulation and timing models plus documentation) are distributed via the ubiquitous DesignWare Library, making them easily accessible to most SoC designers in the world.

"The judges selected Synopsys as the winner in this category based on their ability to bring value to their customers using Power Architecture technology", said Tom Reeves, Vice President, Semiconductor Products and Solutions, IBM Technology Collaboration Solutions.

"The fact that a 100% compatible core can be easily implemented in a non-IBM process technology demonstrates the commitment of both IBM and Synopsys to open standards, making this architecture available to everyone".

"The Beacon Award is recognition of the value Synopsys brings to the Power Architecture community".

"Synopsys recognises the value the Power Architecture brings to the embedded design community", said John Chilton, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Synopsys' Solutions Group.

"Broad Reach's success with our DesignWare PowerPC 440-S clearly demonstrates the value of making a proven architecture available in a synthesisable form".

"In addition, we are able to apply the experience of our Professional Services team in developing high-quality synthesisable IP to create an optimal implementation based on our customers' specific library and foundry requirements".

"We are honoured that these efforts have been recognised by our customer and with IBM's Beacon Award".

In addition to the PowerPC 440-S, Synopsys offers a synthesisable, process-portable version of the PowerPC 405 (PowerPC 405-S) and a firm version of the PowerPC 440 (PowerPC 440-FIRM) through its DesignWare Star IP programme.

Design Views, which allow evaluation of the processor cores, are available at no additional charge to existing DesignWare customers.

Implementation views allow the creation of process-specific versions, and are licensed from IBM but delivered and supported by Synopsys.

Synopsys also offers design services focused on hardening and integrating PowerPC cores.

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