ARM Addresses Challenges of Future SoC Designs

Recently ARM announced its AMBA Verification IP. ARM has been growing at a strong pace driven by the mobile communications market. However, the non-mobile segment, while smaller, is growing at a faster rate. This includes enterprise, home and embedded control applications.

Another growing trend is multi-core. The eventual result will be much more complex SoC’s. These devices will become essentially subsystems on a chip. The increasing complexity leads to bottlenecks. The traffic management within the SoC will become critical. Designers will need a tool that addresses the on-chip communication.

ARM claims to offer a solution for verification and validation of AMBA based SoCs. One EDA company is already an early adopter. Early partner availability is expected for 3Q07 with product release slated for 4Q 07.

Semico Spin

ARM has a long track record of providing its customers with design tools not just CPU core designs. Semico sees ARM addressing future challenges in SoC design at an early stage. The growth of complex multi-core designs is enabled by such a tool.