[Webinar Recap] Managing System-on-Chip (SoC) Complexity: Strategies for Scalable Design

Product Development & Management

[Webinar Recap] Managing System-on-Chip (SoC) Complexity: Strategies for Scalable Design

By |

The semiconductor industry is evolving rapidly, with growing challenges in managing System-on-Chip (SoC) complexity and expanding Intellectual Property (IP) portfolios. How can your team stay ahead while maintaining efficiency and collaboration?

In this webinar, Steve Rush, Principal Solutions Consultant at Jama Software, discussed how Electronic Design Automation (EDA) organizations can adopt a more integrated and controlled approach to IP and SoC management using Jama Connect®.

This webinar provides key insights and practical guidance, including how to:

  • Overcome critical challenges in scaling SoC design and managing growing IP portfolios
  • Implement more integrated and efficient workflows using Jama Connect
  • Achieve measurable improvements in collaboration, scalability, and development outcomes

Steve Rush: It’s a pleasure to be here today to talk to you about this subject. I’ve worked with many customers and prospects across many different verticals, and semiconductor is certainly a vertical that has its own unique set of challenges. This subject is kind of near and dear to a lot of the conversations that I’ve been having, so I really hope that you find this insightful.

In this webinar, we’ll address some of the challenges that many semiconductor design companies are facing when kicking off SoC projects, leveraging the IP that they’ve already developed. Hopefully the audience out there finds this timely and relevant. We’ll level set a bit on the challenge itself, and then discuss three strategies for scaling SoC projects, along with product administrations to support each strategy, and then we’ll wrap up with some Q&A.

First, let’s start with some definitions: IPs and SoCs, what are they? What do we mean? IP cores, sometimes called IP blocks or foundational elements for systems on chip design. They’re really modular building blocks that are designed and purpose-built, and can be compiled to develop an SoC. An SoC, the system-on-chip, is an integrated circuit that comprises all of the system components onto one piece of silicon, which is made up of different IPs.

Our SoC here contains a processor core, a memory IP network on chip, and then multiple IPs themselves, which in and of themselves might be considered projects. When we zoom in to a particular IP, you can see the multiple components of that IP: the microcontroller that acts as the brain of the IP, designed to perform specific tasks and hold processing instructions. The ROM and SRAM, read-only memory and static access memory, are the internal communication fabric, the on-chip network, controlling multiple components, interrupts, controlling electrical current flow, the IO interface, and the input-output interface, which allows IP to communicate to the outside world.

You might be managing this information in a Jama Connect project for an IP core, multiple projects for multiple IP cores, or even multiple versions of those IP cores, depending on your version management strategy. Now that we’ve level-set a bit, let’s move on to some relatable challenges that you might have found yourself in. As semiconductor companies scale, individual IP projects need to be combined onto a single piece of silicon, these SoCs. As we saw in the last slide, different IPs may need to be combined to compile and build that SoC.

Organizing and tracking which IP, and importantly which versions of those IPs, which might be scattered across multiple repositories following different processes, can be daunting. You can imagine if you’re not using a system like Jama Connect, that might require a lot of manual effort, a lot of copy and paste, a lot of data reentry, and that can feel chaotic. For folks out there that are not using Jama Connect or just don’t have a well-defined process in Jama Connect, you might be relying on a lot of institutional knowledge when the time comes to compile these different IPs to build your SoC.

RELATED: Extending End to End Traceability into the Semiconductor Design Cycle

Rush: Maybe your lead engineer knows which versions of the IPs you need to use, or what third-party software licenses you need to monitor and update, but it’s just not well-documented. You don’t really have a system in place to manage all of this. If someone walks out the door, a lot of that knowledge walks out the door as well. Of course, you do what you can to capture that knowledge, and do a knowledge transfer, but it’s still just a very fragile system that you’re relying on.

Maybe you do have some semblance of a system, but it lacks consistency and unification. The IP core requirements are maintained in different systems, maybe different requirement management repositories. Maybe they’re just documented on Wikis, like Confluence, which comes to mind, but there’s no unifying data model. Without that, this creates traceability risk when you recompile everything to build your SoC project. How can you be sure that you’re completely covered and you have no traceability gaps?

Now, I’m not advocating that everyone has to follow the exact same process down to the T. Some level of autonomy might be necessary for different teams managing different SoC projects, and that is necessary, but there should be some unifying model and some unifying process that teams can follow to address these different gaps and risks. Here’s a slide that might resonate with you all. The current challenges you might be facing, the impact of those challenges, the goals, and business outcomes are all sort of documented here.

This represents a cross-section of a lot of customers and prospects that I’ve been talking to in the semiconductor design industry. The strategies that I’ll discuss and impart today speak to both of those personas: a prospect that’s not using Jama Connect or an existing Jama Connect, that just needs to scale up and optimize their use of Jama. Let’s look and talk about some of these challenges. Customers need to scale SoC management on Jama Connect.

Scale, that can be a vague and overused term, but what I think about when I hear this is that customers are really looking for control, a plan, and a tool with the right functionality to help them manage this complexity. Versions of IPs are scattered across multiple projects or systems. A couple things come into mind right away here: that immediate clarity when it comes to either applying a change, or resolving a defect, or figuring out what third-party software is being used for which project or product, it just is impossible.

RELATED: Compliance Made Easy with Jama Connect® for Automotive and Semiconductor Development

Rush: Future projects are coming down the pike, requiring reusing out-of-context IPs for in-context SoC projects, possibly needing to maintain both the out-of-context IPs and then the new in-context IPs, which make up the SoC. Again, a plan, a process, and a tool are needed to support this. Let’s discuss some of the impacts of these challenges. Disorganization, because you need to manage content across projects or potentially across systems, there can be just a lot of lost time, a lot of lost hours in terms of re-documenting things, and just generally a lot of confusion.

There can be traceability risks, especially if the data that you’re managing does not have a unified data model, or that data is just not integrated across systems. How can you be sure there are no traceability gaps? Future projects just take longer to spin up, because there’s a lot of rework. Yes, you can save that content as and work from there, but syncing those changes across the different copies that you’re making at scale just really isn’t possible without a tool like Jama Connect.

Let’s talk about some of the goals that we hope to achieve by adopting some of the strategies that I’ll outline. We want to scale SoC management, and again, what I think this means is developing a plan, using a tool that can support these use cases, and implementing a controlled yet flexible process. Leveraging libraries and variants to compile your IPs for reuse. This will be one of the strategies that we’ll discuss later on.

Immediate version clarity, both for software licensing and defective change management, and applying those changes across different projects in a scalable way, which leads us to the outcomes. What we hope to achieve by adopting some of these strategies we’ll streamline SoC projects coming down the pike by using and leveraging existing IP in a controlled and organized method. This will give us high-quality source control, using a library approach in Jama Connect, so that defects and changes can be applied to working projects at scale and easily.

Maintaining licensing becomes clearer in this library-managed system, and the path to regulatory compliance can even be eased, as with all the processes we’ve adopted, traceability risks can be mitigated and reduced. A look into live traceability is possible, and we’ll unpack that a little bit later in the webinar today. You can increase time to value, manage change, and increase product confidence with all of these strategies.

WATCH THE ENTIRE WEBINAR HERE:
Managing System-on-Chip (SoC) Complexity: Strategies for Scalable Design

Steve Rush
Latest posts by Steve Rush (see all)