ARM and Synopsys expand collaboration

CAMBRIDGE, UK & MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: ARM and Synopsys Inc. have signed a multi-year subscription agreement that expands Synopsys' access to a broad range of ARM intellectual property (IP) and related technologies to enable optimization of Synopsys tools and methodologies for ARM-based system-on-chips (SoCs).

Through this agreement, Synopsys has pre-production access to ARM Cortex processors for the ARMv8-A and ARMv7-A architectures, ARM Mali graphics processors, ARM CoreLink system IP, ARM Artisan physical IP, and ARM POP IP for implementation acceleration.

Building on more than 20 years of collaboration as well as the August 2012 license agreement between the companies for ARMv7-A processors and related IP, this new agreement allows Synopsys to further optimize its design flows and tools for ARM-based SoCs, enabling designers to meet their power, performance and area goals, while reducing cost and time-to-market.

"We have collaborated extensively with Synopsys for more than 20 years to ensure our mutual customers can get innovative products to market quickly and still meet their performance, power and area targets," said Pete Hutton, executive VP and president of product groups, ARM. "With Synopsys' early access to our latest IP and our ongoing close collaboration, we can provide our customers solutions that work effectively together as they design, implement and verify their SoCs."

With this agreement, Synopsys can develop and distribute optimized Synopsys tool scripts to ARM partners and deliver training on the use of Synopsys tools and flows with the ARM IP. Synopsys' early access to ARM pre-production IP ensures that early licensees of the latest ARM cores have optimized tools and methodology in place when they are ready to begin their design projects.

Designers creating products for a broad range of markets, including wearable, mobile, networking and server, will benefit from closer integration of the Synopsys tools and ARM IP together with optimized design flows that can take advantage of process technologies ranging from leading-edge FinFET to mature processes.

Building on the foundation of the companies' previous collaborations, which have delivered solutions that span implementation, verification, system architecture design and software development, this new agreement allows the companies to extend these results to benefit designers using the latest ARM IP. Reference Implementations (RIs) for ARM processors, library and POP IP with Synopsys Galaxy implementation tools deliver optimized power, performance and area.

These RIs together with tool optimizations have led to numerous tape out successes for mutual customers with ARM's most advanced IP, including the Cortex-A57 CPU, Cortex-A53 CPU and Mali-T760 GPU. Designers using Synopsys' VCS functional verification and ZeBu emulation solutions benefit from significantly enhanced simulation performance for ARM processors and perform hardware/software debug on Synopsys' Verdi debug platform with direct support for ARM Cortex processors.

Verification engineers are verifying the cache-coherent subsystems in their SoCs, taking advantage of Synopsys verification IP (VIP), ZeBu transactors and Verdi Protocol Analyzer support of the ARM AMBA® interface specification, including the latest, AMBA 5 CHI. Software developers are using Virtualizer Development Kits (VDKs) for ARM processors to perform early software development, architects are using Synopsys' Platform Architect MCO for early power and performance optimization of ARM-based systems and system designers are using HAPS FPGA-based prototyping to accelerate hardware/software integration and validation of systems based on ARM CPUs and GPUs.

Designers benefit not only from these design solutions, but also Synopsys' field expertise and Core Optimization Services developed over many years of enabling ARM-based design success. ARM, Synopsys and mutual customers will present examples of these successes at the upcoming ARM TechCon, Oct. 1-3, 2014, in Silicon Valley.

"Designers benefit directly from this alignment of the industry's IP and EDA leaders," said Deirdre Hanford, executive VP, customer engagement at Synopsys. "Through collaboration with ARM, we've been able to accelerate many leading semiconductor companies' innovations. This new agreement will allow us to deliver timely design and verification solutions that take advantage of Synopsys' latest tools and methodology together with ARM's newest, most advanced IP."