7th Feb 2018 - NetSpeed Systems Inc. today announced a collaboration with Synopsys to enable generated RTL of NetSpeed’s interconnect IP to be used with Synopsys' Platform Architect™ virtual prototyping solution. The collaboration enables the delivery of advanced interconnect solutions for leading advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and datacenter system-on-chips (SoCs) designs. The integrated solutions offer system designers the ability to simulate realistic system-level performance of their end product architectures.

“As we have collaborated with industry leaders developing ADAS and datacenter SoCs, we recognize the challenge system designers and architects face to avoid late discovery of system performance and power problems, which can be costly in terms of both project schedules and budgets,” said Eshel Haritan, Vice President of R&D in the Synopsys Verification Group. “Our collaboration with NetSpeed enables these companies to validate system performance and functional safety for their SoC designs much earlier in the design process.”

Heterogeneous platform designs are becoming the norm for ADAS and data center SoCs because they offer higher performance and better power efficiency than multicore designs. However, heterogeneous designs are far more complex than multicore implementations due to the need to balance diverse processing and traffic needs.

To address the challenges of heterogeneous designs, NetSpeed offers a programmable, highly configurable cache coherent IP that enables SoC architects to create custom interconnect solutions to achieve optimal performance for their application. Synopsys, with its Platform Architect solution, offers system architects the ability to assemble and analyze system-level performance models before RTL is finalized.

“Performance and latency are two key metrics that must be validated early on for automotive and datacenter SoCs designs,” said Sundari Mitra, CEO of NetSpeed. “Coherency adds another dimension of complexity, as does functional safety in automotive SoCs which also must be verified. Our collaboration with Synopsys is an important step in ensuring leading-edge ADAS and data center OEMs are able to validate their designs quickly and easily.”

The collaboration between the two companies allows the generated RTL of Netspeed’s interconnect to be easily imported into Synopsys' Platform Architect environment for architecture analysis. System designers can assemble their design by combining the NetSpeed interconnect with traffic generators and architecture models available in the Platform Architect model library. This flow enables early analysis of end-application performance and allows for highly efficient optimization of heterogeneous system architectures early in the design and months before system software or RTL availability.