The explosive growth of applications such as 5G, High Performance Compute (HPC), augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR), automotive, and IoT demands the best possible power, performance and area (PPA), low cost, high reliability, and a quick design cycle. As a result, SoC designs for these applications become more complex and demand more functionality, less power consumption and fewer faults. Optimal implementation can be achieved only when the design components and the manufacturing process are optimized together, and when designers can extract the best out of the IP with the process to bring the best products to market.
Advances in semiconductor manufacturing with technologies such as extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography help meet the market demands by permitting the complex functionality in a small form factor. In addition, EUV enables designs to continue pushing performance while keeping power under control.
Arm was one of the early strategic members of SAFETM (Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem) program. The program provides comprehensive design solutions, and gives the ecosystem and partners access to leading co-optimized physical IP solutions to enhance next-generation SoC designs. As part of this, Arm and Samsung Foundry continuously work together to develop Arm solutions along with Samsung’s advanced manufacturing processes to meet the ever demanding market needs.
Arm and Samsung Foundry recently extended their relationship with the launch of the comprehensive Arm Artisan physical IP platform on the Samsung Foundry 5LPE (5nm low-power Early) EUV process. The 5LPE platform will enable our partners to bring products to market faster by using Arm POP IP implementation solutions with best-in-class PPA.
The announcement is the latest in a vibrant, successful 14-year collaboration between Arm and Samsung Foundry. This partnership has produced technologies and libraries starting at 65nm, all the way to most advanced sub-7nm nodes. Leveraging Arm’s unique IP integration capabilities, Samsung Foundry was able to use Arm physical and processor IP to validate the design readiness of their most advanced node.
Samsung Foundry is the one of first foundries to market and adopt the EUV process. The Samsung 5LPE process is an evolution from 7LPP (low-power plus). The Artisan Physical IP is foundry-sponsored for 5LPE, built on and extending the 7LPP platform offering. The 5LPE Platform consists of high-density (HD) and UHD logic architectures, and a comprehensive suite of memory compilers to cater to multiple market segments. In addition, the general purpose I/O (GPIO) offering is fully programmable, supporting both 1.8V and 3.3V libraries. Enhancing the offering are POP IP solutions for our latest processor cores, including DynamIQ technology.
In 5LPE, logic libraries include an entirely new standard cell UHD architecture. This architecture is ideal for power, area and cost sensitive designs. Cell sets across architectures have expanded to meet the needs of designs across market segments and include cells with expanded optimizations for area, extreme low-power, and high performance.
Memory compilers have a wide range of optimization points, echoing the logic libraries for the best overall physical IP solution. The compilers output instances that can solve power issues with multiple Vt periphery options, giving users compile-time control over the performance-power targets of a given instance size. Supporting a wide range of applications from networking to mobile to IoT and Machine Learning, the Artisan memory compilers simplify SoC design with a large selection of standard, low-power and yield optimization features.
Arm POP IP is designed to accelerate partners’ Arm core designs to ensure products come to market quickly with low risk and PPA suited for their design requirements. Arm achieves this with internal collaboration and knowledge across market segments, architectural experts, and internally developed Artisan physical IP tuned to give every extra drop of performance improvement while reducing the power budgets.
Externally, the collaboration extends to our EDA vendor and foundry partners, like Samsung Foundry, to ensure the tools, IP and process rules are optimized together. POP implementation brings all the pieces together and delivers the optimizations required for each of the IP, tool and flows. Arm has developed POP IP solutions at Samsung Foundry’s 5nm process, including Cortex-A78, Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A55, all of which are available targeted to a specific PPA and are ready to use.
On top of the ready-to-use POP IP, Arm optimizes physical IP for different market segments and applications. For example, the ultra high-density (UHD) library is ideal for a GPU implementation, and will be optimized differently from the high speed (HS) libraries used for infrastructure cores. The optimization points for memory compilers and instances will vary if used in an IoT application versus a premium mobile application. The complete POP IP solution includes the Artisan physical IP appropriate to both your application and design requirements.
The Artisan physical IP platform and Arm POP IP for the Samsung Foundry 5LPE process is available for partner designs in the areas of mobile, consumer, high performance compute and automotive. For custom PPA requirements and more information, please contact Arm Physical Design group or visit Arm Physical IP page.