Increasing design skills for custom compute

By _Codasip Blog

July 4, 2023

As discussed in an another blog post by Mike Eftimakis, there are limitations to traditional design methods that use “off-the-shelf” processor cores. Traditionally, software engineers try to fit their code to the constraints of the chosen processor hardware. The alternative is to co-optimize the hardware and software together to create a custom compute solution. You could even think of it as being ‘software-defined hardware’.

To realize this vision a challenge is the shortage of processor design skills in the industry. This blog explores the industry’s skills trend and how the mismatch between available skills and demand can be solved.

The custom compute opportunity

The designers of systems are increasingly looking to differentiate their products through their silicon by adding their own “secret sauce”. Apple in the computer space and Tesla in the automotive space have demonstrated that their own SoCs directly add value to their end products and market valuations. This reverses a few decades of processor core consolidation into an ever-narrower range of processor IP products and suppliers.

In the same timeframe, semiconductor scaling has dramatically slowed down and moving to new finer technology nodes has become prohibitively expensive for many applications. A direct result is that more and more companies are wanting to create varied, specialized processing units where the design is matched to their computational workload.

A major barrier to this specialization is the finite number of processor design skills available.

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