25th Jun 2018 - NetSpeed Systems today announced the release of its SoCBuilder, an AI-powered SoC design and integration platform. SoCBuilder includes a catalog of pre-integrated third-party IP along with application-specific reference designs for AI, Automotive, 5G, hyperscale compute and AR/VR. SoCBuilder is designed to make SoC development faster, easier and fail-proof, reducing the time to assemble systems to days instead of weeks and months.

The semiconductor industry is going through a tectonic shift as new end-user applications—especially AI-enabled applications—demand unprecedented levels of compute performance and efficiency. Applications such as autonomous vehicles, mixed reality, and hyperscale computing require new and far more complex SoC architectures and designs. To succeed in this new climate, manufacturers need better tools to manage design complexity and facilitate the integration of third-party IP.

“As systems have become more sophisticated, the use of third-party IP has grown tremendously,” said Sundari Mitra, CEO of NetSpeed. “Despite the fact that the IP is pre-verified, system developers often struggle during IP integration, largely due to problems that occur at the interfaces. To address this problem, we created our NetSpeed Connect partner program which ensures easy integration of partner IP for customers who use any of NetSpeed’s interconnect solutions. This is how we source the IP catalog at the heart of SoCBuilder.”

SoCBuilder is a one of a kind platform that aims to democratize hardware development by making SoC development easy, accessible and fail-proof. It provides a unified design environment for IP, chassis integration, design and verification. The system uses meta-data to capture the SoC specification and design details including basic floorplan information. SoCBuilder then applies machine learning to find optimum design solutions, drawing from built-in reference designs and a rich IP catalog that delivers a wide range of pre-integrated critical SoC IP. Architects can review automatically generated results and fine-tune their implementations. A key advantage of the platform is its formal construction engine that ensures a first-time-right solution from architecture to design to verification and post-silicon bring-up.

“NetSpeed's vision is to transform SoC Design with new levels of intelligence and automation,” said Fred Weber, former AMD CTO and industry veteran who is a NetSpeed board member. “By harnessing the power of data and machine-learning, SoCBuilder delivers on this vision and is the next logical step in NetSpeed’s journey.”

SoCBuilder is an extension to NetSpeed’s NocStudio flagship development platform, which harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to deliver the extreme performance next-gen applications need. NocStudio uses advanced algorithms and graph theory to solve common design challenges such as cache coherency and QoS and to eliminate conflicts between subsystems, including deadlocks. It enables designers to work more efficiently at a higher level of abstraction, reducing development time by up to 80%. NocStudio is included with all NetSpeed interconnect products.