Overview
The SMBus library provides open-drain bi-directional I/O cells designed for the High-Power SMBus two-line interface. It is compliant with the Rev 3.1 of the SMBus specification.
The design supports the Sm, Fm and Fm+ modes of operation at the SMBus operating voltage (VDDP) of either extended range 3.3V or standard 1.8V logic.
This 7nm library is available in a staggered flip chip implementation.
To utilize these cells in the pad ring, an additional library is required – 1.8V Support: Power. That library contains the power cells, the POC cell, and a rail splitter to isolate the SMBus cells in their own power domain as recommended. It also contains an input-only buffer, isolated analog I/O, and a full complement of power cells along with corner and spacer cells to assemble a complete pad ring by abutment. The rail splitter allows multiple power domains to be isolated in the same pad ring while maintaining continuous VDD/VSS for robust ESD protection.
ESD Protection:
? JEDEC compliant
o 2KV ESD Human Body Model (HBM)
o 500 V ESD Charge Device Model (CDM)
Latch-up Immunity:
? JEDEC compliant
o Tested to I-Test criteria of ± 100mA @ 125°C
Learn more about GPIO IP core
For over a decade, Sofics has collaborated with CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Sofics has delivered advanced GPIO cells tailored for radiation-hardened applications, supporting CERN’s groundbreaking particle physics experiments.
This paper provides a complete solution to the GPIO Verification for any SoC. GPIO interface is available in every ASIC. To avoid duplicate efforts and (save) time to verify the GPIO interface, we have produced this Generic GPIO verification suite. It is a UVM-based verification environment, with all the necessary subcomponents that are required to verify any GPIO design.
Most chips live an easy life with room temperature, clean power and a steady supply. The chips in this article do not. They sit inside nuclear reactors, ride on satellites and work next to particle beams, where a single stray particle can corrupt data or destroy a device.
One of the critical problems in today’s computing is that transporting data can be more costly in energy and time than computing. With the growing complexity of AI models, SoC designers have shifted their focus toward optimizing memory hierarchies, increasing bandwidth in interconnects, and architecting based on workloads for improved efficiency.
To complete our task as engineers we rely on the tools we use. We collaborated with Siemens EDA solutions back in 2025 on a webinar about how we use their tools to develop our designs and layouts.
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is moving from theory to engineering reality. With NIST-standardized algorithms ML-KEM (FIPS 203) and ML-DSA (FIPS 204) now finalized, FPGA developers face a practical challenge: How to integrate these algorithms efficiently on resource-constrained hardware?
