Leveraging TechInsights' Compute to optimize floorplan and technology selection processes, ensuring alignment with product objectives and accelerating product development cycles

The Challenge

The business has a strong position in semiconductor manufacturing and specializes in advanced logic chips and stays competitive by adopting and integrating new technologies quickly after their market introduction.

A typical System on Chip (SoC) project for the organization requires extensive collaboration across multiple teams within their Silicon Design Group, with key stages of their product development including CMOS and packaging technology selection, floorplan development, and physical design implementation. These processes involve complex decisions regarding design sizing, library selection, interconnect layers, and design of any custom IP blocks, such as for external signaling interfaces.

The business faced the challenge of navigating complicated and interacting design decisions while ensuring its products remain competitive in terms of power, performance, area, and cost (PPAC). With multiple product markets to serve, the business must balance a wide range of end-application requirements while balancing performance and cost objectives in its design strategies for its SoCs.

The Solution

TechInsights’ Compute product provided critical insights that assisted the business in overcoming the challenges associated with ensuring its design was differentiated from competitive products. Through the project stages, the analyses provided by TechInsights supported their technology selection, floorplan development, and physical design implementation by offering fact-based, detailed, real-world competitive analysis and benchmarking.

Our broad catalog of analysis on the most advanced technologies deployed by major foundries includes detailed assessments of CMOS processes and packaging technologies and provided the organization with crucial design, layout, technology and performance data. This data was used to support its technology selection and make informed decisions, particularly important if they don’t have access yet to the Process Design Kit (PDK).

TechInsights’ floorplan analysis from competitive SoC designs includes benchmarking information on leading edge SoCs targeting different applications. This analysis enabled the team to study competitive floorplan strategies and how competitor designs addressed multi-core placement, cache memory allocation, and block positioning challenges in the design of their products. These insights into competitors’ designs, like optimizing timing path length between core and L3 cache, helped the business optimize its floorplans and ensure a competitive design.

The Results

TechInsights’ Compute product helped the business significantly reduce uncertainty and risk associated with critical design choices. Using TechInsights’ data, the customer was able to optimize its floorplan and technology selection process and align to their product objectives, leading to faster product development cycles. This in turn helped the business reduce its product development time by approximately 15%, allowing it to release products to market months earlier than competitors. This early release led to a potential market share gain of 5%, leading to over $10 million in additional revenue.