- NXP achieves significantly improved runtime with Synopsys’ native automotive design solutions on its 16nm high-performance automotive network communications processing chip
- New native automotive technologies in IC Compiler II for triple-mode redundancy register implementation significantly alleviates routing congestion and wire length while achieving substantially improved job-execution capacity
Synopsys announced that NXP plans to deploy Synopsys’ native automotive design solutions to improve quality-of-results (QoR) and time-to-results (TTR) for its next-generation, safety-critical system-on-chip (SoC) designs. The accelerating evolution of vehicle technologies means that more automotive chips are required to satisfy higher automotive safety integrity levels (ASILs) for autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). To meet higher ASILs, functional safety mechanisms, such as triple-mode redundancy (TMR) and dual-core lock-step (DCLS), can be used. These mechanisms mitigate random hardware failures in automotive designs, such as single-event upsets (SEUs), but can present TTR, capacity, and QoR design challenges which can be significantly alleviated using Synopsys’ native automotive design solutions.
Using its 16-nanometer (nm) S32G274 automotive network processing chip, NXP tested Synopsys’ native solutions for implementing TMR registers. Compared to its existing flow, NXP observed significantly reduced IC Compiler II placement and legalization runtime by more than 20 percent. This functionality also markedly improved capacity of job execution, which enabled NXP to leverage the most cost-effective compute farm. In addition, the native automotive solutions alleviated routing congestion and wire length in dense areas of the design, and improved usability with simplified implementation and comprehensive reporting to replace NXP’s homegrown scripting solutions.
Synopsys’ native automotive solutions enable designers to achieve their target ASILs by providing the industry’s most comprehensive feature set to implement functional safety mechanisms, such as TMR, DCLS, and failsafe finite state machine (FSM). Synopsys’ native automotive solutions comprise a complete digital design flow incorporating functional safety (FuSa)-enabled technologies.
