In early 2019, I was a senior R&D manager in Mentor, A Siemens Business. Our customers were creating power-sensitive ICs intended for wearables and Internet of Things (IoT) products with 22nm/28nm technologies for markets ranging from automotive to military/aerospace to consumer. A challenge for these design teams was reducing the overall time, effort, and cost of all stages of the design and implementation. Building a full design flow took time and specialized knowledge, introduced risk, and increased both the total cost of tool ownership and time to production.
However, our company was only good at selling point tools while our competitor was promoting a full design flow solution. Our salespeople told me that there was not any engineering manager who can integrate the full flow with our company’s point tools and helped them sell a full design flow solution. This caught my curiosity.
Back in my early days in MediaTek group before Mentor, we had been providing system companies with reference development board and sample code. Turnkey solutions can save customers’ time and money when implemented with success.
Why not use the same idea on the current SoC design flow to serve our customers? We can create reference flows with sample scripts. Customers can modify the scripts to meet spec of their own application.
Customer Obsession
Customer obsession is my first principle serving my organization. I shared the idea with my manager, Alex Volkov, the director of engineering in Digital Design and Implementation Solution division. He got excited and recognized that the reference flow is an innovation and must be our flagship project. I was interested in the pursuit of long-term value creation and decided to take the ownership of this flagship project.
I would like to think big and look around corners for ways to serve customers. Concerning the sample design, I decided to use Arm Cortex-M33 MCU, the most popular MCU solution used in our customers’ IoT edge devices.
Concerning the technologies, I decided to use the three major technologies that can cover what our customers were using. The 1st technology is 0.18um. It is integrated with high-voltage, non-volatile memory, and ultra-low noise modules. It is targeted to silicon devices for use in automotive, IoT, imaging/display, industrial control, medical, sensors, space, and power management markets. The 2nd technology is 22nm ultra low power. It is ideal for a wide variety of applications including consumer ICs for set top box, digital TV and surveillance applications. It is also well-suited for power-sensitive ICs intended for wearables and IoT products requiring longer battery life. The 3rd technology is 14nm FinFET. It is competitive with the semiconductor industry’s leading standards.
Those three technologies represent mature, mainstream, and advanced technologies. We covered what our customers need to use. I calculated the risk and decided to start from 0.18um, the most mature technology for this flagship project so that I can learn fast. After 0.18um, I can move to 22nm ultra low power followed by 14nm FinFET, the most advanced technology.
Dive Deep
I had dived deep into all tools from other product divisions, studied each of them, and started cross-function and cross-region communication earning trust with support from other product divisions. I got hands-on experience on the tools and created scripts to integrate all the tools into one reference flow.
The reference flow project must be based on a real foundry technology, I presented the idea to the top management in UMC, our foundry partner. They approved their resource working with me and provided process technology files with their technologies.
Digital design and implementation flows are notoriously complicated and hard to use. Even experienced design teams can waste valuable time just getting the tools set up, the environment tuned exactly right, and the command settings perfected for their design. This is the challenge I took: create a flow that gives fast results out of the box but allows for easy customization and tuning to create the most optimized results. The goal was to simplify the user experience and add predictability and flexibility to the design process. I would like to invent and simplify the design flow.
At the heart of this reference flow is the knowledge-based set of recipes included with our digital implementation tool. My capable team had created those recipes. I valued frugality and simplicity so that I reused those recipes to integrate other tools.
I delivered the full reference flow with an automated and well documented set of data and scripts to run synthesis, logic equivalence checking, design for test, place and route with a low-power setup, sign-off, and static timing analysis.
My scripts, the demonstration design data, and a user guide are available through the Mentor web site. Customers can modify the scripts to complete any design and optimize the performance to meet their own spec.
Publication
Here is the link of my article,
Easier Low Power ICs With Reference Flows in Semiconductor Engineering website.
Our top management recognized the value of this innovation and approved marketing resource for me to create white papers and got them published in Mentor.com website. There are
English,
traditional Mandarin and
simplified Mandarin versions. Arm and UMC both approved the publication.
As a result, Mentor offers a comprehensive set of IC design technologies that address the most pressing challenges facing IC development teams. Through tight collaboration with foundries, Mentor can offer reference flows that give our customers a short-cut to success. The salespeople can sell a full design flow solution integrated with multiple point tools. My work becomes a template for new reference flows with new technologies.
