Extending Arm Total Design Ecosystem to Accelerate Infrastructure Innovation

By _arm - arm Blogs

March 4, 2024

More than 20 partners now driving leading-edge innovation

March 4, 2024 - A year ago, generative AI burst onto the scene like a bolt of lightning. Immediately, it illuminated the demand for more compute power and flexibility to drive more optimized solutions to process the massive amounts of data generated by billions of devices.

That’s a mouthful, but it’s one of the driving forces behind Arm Total Design, a leading group of industry leaders collaborating to accelerate and simplify the development of Arm Neoverse CSS-based systems. In just a few months, Arm Total Design has proven to be a fast-growing ecosystem of expertise innovating on Arm Neoverse to meet surging data center demands.

With Arm Total Design, partners get preferential access to Arm Neoverse CSS, pre-integrated IP and EDA tools, design services, foundry support, and commercial software and firmware support. By working with this ecosystem, partners can leverage the expertise and resources of the industry to bring custom silicon solutions rapidly to market.

Last week, Arm announced nine new companies participating in Arm Total Design, which has now reached more than 20 active partners in key areas of expertise:

Design Services

• ASICLAND, which specializes in designing and manufacturing ASICs across various industries.
• HCL, a global technology company offering IT services, consulting, and business solutions.

Complementary IP

• Ceva, a leading provider of digital signal processing technology for various applications including wireless communications, audio processing, and computer vision.

Advanced Analytics

• proteanTecs, a leading provider of advanced deep data analytics and on-chip monitoring solutions for semiconductor and electronics companies to improve product reliability, power and performance throughout their lifecycle.

Semiconductor companies

• Jaguar Micro, a semiconductor company focused on developing MCU and embedded solutions for automotive, industrial, and consumer electronics applications.
• Novatek, a provider of display driver ICs and related solutions for flat panel displays used in smartphones, tablets, monitors, and televisions.
• RealTek, which supplies networking and multimedia ICs, for Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and audio applications.

Semiconductor foundries

• Samsung, the global conglomerate known for its wide range of products including smartphones, televisions, home appliances, semiconductors, and memory chips.

EDA

• Siemens EDA, a global company dedicated to helping companies engineer a smarter future faster. Siemens is committed to delivering the world’s most comprehensive portfolio of industry-proven, AI-driven electronic design automation (EDA) software as well as hardware and services.

New approach to innovation

Why the keen interest? We see Neoverse CSS as a major shift in how Arm delivers solutions to infrastructure. Neoverse CSS – optimized for power, performance, and area, and system-level feature enablement – are designed to accelerate time-to-market, reduce costs for developers and free up engineering resources for innovation.

Arm Total Design is a game-changer for the semiconductor industry, as it offers several benefits to Arm’s partners and customers, including:

• More Innovation: Arm Total Design enables partners to create more customized and optimized solutions that meet their unique needs and goals. Partners can differentiate their products by adding their own value and innovation, while leveraging Arm’s Neoverse platform and CSS-specific expertise from the ecosystem.

• Faster Time-to-Market: Arm Total Design allows partners move faster. By leveraging Arm Neoverse CSS as the starting point of their design, and then leveraging expert partners to bring that design to completion, companies can replace uncertainty and doubt with confidence and success when they embark on a new custom silicon design.

• More Efficient Investment: Arm Total Design multiplies the efficiency effect of Neoverse CSS, which already saves partners the effort of integrating a complex CPU subsystem. Arm Total Design expands that with complementary IP, more efficient design flows and centers of excellence. Saved engineering hours can be translated into direct savings to the bottom line. Or they can be re-invested in ways that can further differentiate a design. At the heart of our success is a vibrant, global supply chain, enriched by partnerships with design leaders from innovation hubs in the US, Europe, Asia, and beyond, alongside collaborations with all three major foundries. This diverse network, spanning geography and technology, brings together cutting-edge silicon designs and the most advanced nodes within the Arm ecosystem to ensure custom silicon is available everywhere.

Driving efficiency, powering workloads

Arm Total Design also offers the support and training from Arm to develop skills and capabilities around high-end infrastructure designs or to give other companies the ability to grow their ASIC design-services business. An example of this is design services company Faraday Technology’s partnership with Arm and Intel to create a cutting-edge 64-core SoC using Intel’s 18A technology, targeting hyperscale data centers, the network edge, and 5G deployments.

The enthusiasm for Arm Total Design also is fostering an ecosystem around chiplets in which members and others can collaborate on initiatives such as the AMBA CHI chip-to-chip interconnect protocol. This collaboration is facilitating industry-wide alignment on the fundamental interfaces and system architectures that will enable innovation around multi-die SoC designs (chiplets). One example of this is the multi-core CPU chiplet from Socionext, which adopts Neoverse CSS technology and is being developed on TSMC 2nm to target server CPUs, data center AI edge servers, and 5/6G infrastructure.

Smoothing the way to the future

Arm Total Design is a new approach to innovation that empowers Arm’s partners to create more customized and optimized solutions for various applications and markets, unlocking growth and scale.

By leveraging Arm Total Design, Arm’s partners can deliver more value to their customers and end-users, and enter new markets, all while reducing time-to-market and development costs. Viewed another way, Arm Total Design is not only a set of ecosystem partners providing IP, services and tools; it’s a new mindset that fosters collaboration, flexibility, and innovation on Arm across the chip design ecosystem in the age of AI.

Supporting Partners

ASICLAND

“Joining Arm Total Design gives us more opportunities to pursue our vision – being a value-up partner through constant innovation and providing the finest semiconductor solutions to a global market.”

James Lee, CEO, ASICLAND.

Ceva

“Arm Total Design means customers can pair Ceva’s market leading PentaG baseband platform with proven Neoverse CSS computing platforms – unlocking more performance and energy efficiency for 5G infrastructure, Non-Terrestrial Networks and other high performance communication applications.”

Iri Trashanski, Chief Strategy Officer, Ceva.

HCLTech

“As a valued partner within ARM’s Total Design ecosystem, HCLTech is dedicated to delivering turnkey semiconductor solutions crafted on the foundation of Arm Neoverse CSS technology. Together, we address the forefront of next-gen applications, providing clients with a collaborative edge in innovation and a pathway to sustainable success.”

RaviKumar Chirugudu, Senior Vice President, ERS(Engineering R&D services), HCLTech.

Novatek

“We are delighted to bring our extensive expertise in custom design to Arm Total Design. With the support of leading foundry processes and advanced packaging partners, as well as our proactive investment in chiplets and advanced processes coupled with software expertise, we are confident in our ability to rapidly provide mass production and ecosystem services to our customers in need of Arm Neoverse low-power and high-performance custom solutions. ”

Steve Wang,Vice Chairman and President, Novatek

ProteanTecs

“proteanTecs’ deep data analytics solutions give the electronics industry the confidence to scale, while meeting all the requirements of mega-functionality, field reliability and power/ performance. Joining Arm Total Design expands our existing collaboration and brings our unique ML-driven chip telemetry to the Arm Neoverse ecosystem. Mutual customers can now accelerate their time to market, enhance their manufacturing process with data-driven insights and monitor the system health and performance during lifetime operation, boosting reliability and reducing power.”

Uzi Baruch, Chief Strategy Officer (CSO), proteanTecs

Samsung

“Samsung is thrilled to build upon our long relationship with Arm by joining Arm Total Design. This will extend Arm Neoverse CSS customers’ benefit with Samsung’s latest technologies from FinFET to GAA, such as our SF4X and SF2 process nodes.”

Gibong Jeong, Executive Vice President and head of Foundry Business Development Team, Samsung Electronics

Siemens

“Siemens is dedicated to ensuring the best experience for the electronic design community by providing both industry-leading tools and impactful services. Arm Total Design enables us to optimize our offerings for Arm Neoverse CSS platforms and expand our contribution to our customers’ technical and business success.”

Sam George, Vice President of Consulting and Learning Services for the Siemens EDA division of Siemens Digital Industries Software.

Realtek

“Realtek and Arm have a long history of utilizing Arm IP and it’s solutions, across a broad range of markets. We are excited to be a key partner in Taiwan for Arm Total Design. Arm Total Design is helping Realtek expand our business into the infrastructure market by building expertise on Neoverse CSS, targeted for data centers, AI, and networking use cases.”

Edson Dong, Vice President, International Market and Sales Dept., Realtek