Siemens delivers end-to-end silicon quality assurance for next-generation IC designs with new Solido IP Validation Suite

May 7, 2024 -- Siemens Digital Industries Software today introduced Solido™ IP Validation Suite software, a comprehensive, automated signoff solution for quality assurance across all design intellectual property (IP) types, including standard cells, memories and IP blocks. This new solution provides complete quality assurance (QA) coverage across all IP design views and formats, as well as version-to-version IP qualification for more predictable full-chip IP integration cycles and faster time-to-market.

Integration of off–the-shelf design IP for next-generation semiconductor designs continues to expand due to the quality-enhancing and time-saving advantages of IP reuse and modularization. To achieve silicon success, all IP must be validated for correctness and consistency early in the design flow, as issues discovered late in the design cycle may result in costly tapeout revisions or silicon re-spins.

Design IP is articulated in multiple design views such as logical, physical, electrical, timing, and power analysis contexts. However, thoroughly validating IP across all these perspectives and formats can be particularly time-consuming, often leading to significant production schedule delays.

The Solido IP Validation Suite helps to minimize these delays by providing production and integration teams with automated, comprehensive and customizable IP validation capabilities. The suite includes Siemens’ Solido™ Crosscheck™ software and Solido™ IPdelta™ software, both of which provide a comprehensive set of IP QA checks targeted for all types of design and foundational IP, incorporating in-view, cross-view, and version-to-version QA checks in a streamlined solution. The Solido IP Validation Suite offers rapid, full-flow coverage QA for IP production and integration teams through advanced features like smart parsing for IP data re-use, additive IP QA for automatic change identification and merging of QA reports, and seamless integration with industry-leading verification platforms like Siemens' Calibre® platform.

“With the increasing importance of design IP in semiconductor design, efficient and correct IP validation becomes a critical step towards silicon success,” said Amit Gupta, vice president and general manager, Custom IC Verification, Siemens Digital Industries Software. "The Solido IP Validation Suite provides a scalable and repeatable solution to identify and prevent design-breaking issues, helping IP production teams achieve high-quality IP delivery at every iteration, and helping chip-level design teams achieve faster tape-out schedules with fully qualified, easier-to-integrate design IP.”

To learn more about Siemens’ new Solido IP Validation Suite and how it is helping customers to deliver the highest quality IP to their customers, visit https://eda.sw.siemens.com/en-US/ic/solido/

Customer endorsements

“Renesas' memory IP supports a wide range of operating conditions,” said Shuji Katayama, principal EDA engineer, Digital Backend Design Methodology Department, EDA Division, Renesas. “To quickly and comprehensively ensure the reliability of these memory IPs, we have used Solido IP Validation Suite, which can be easily customized to meet our requirements. Our custom rules have contributed to improving the quality of our memory IPs.”

“The Solido IP Validation Suite provides a comprehensive QA solution. It has robust cross-view checking features which simplify and improve QA efficiency, and is very user friendly and customizable,” said Ming Fatt Yee, design automation engineer, MaxLinear. “The Solido IP Validation Suite delivers the accuracy required for library deliverables, and customizability to meet our tailored needs.”

“With an extensive set of production-proven validation checks, Solido IP Validation Suite has enabled our QA teams to achieve a higher level of coverage while allowing our development teams to do more in shorter schedule time,” said Amr Shehata, CAD manager, Mixel, Inc. “The solution is now an integral part of our QA methodology, enabling us to deliver differentiated end products with confidence and agility.”

“Solido Crosscheck ensures full coverage and consistency between IP views, by leveraging a comprehensive and customizable set of IP validation checks for production,” said Hema Ramamurthy, custom circuits lead and manager, Rivos Inc. “Solido IP Validation Suite is an integral part of Rivos’ IP QA methodology and enables us to ensure that IP issues are detected early and that the final designs meet the highest QA metrics."

“The adoption of Solido IP Validation Suite has enabled us to significantly accelerate our IP QA process,” said Ilan Sever, Vice President of R&D at Weebit Nano. “With this solution, we have access to an entire IP QA framework covering validation checks across a wide range of design views, all in an automated and customizable flow. As a provider of advanced semiconductor memory technologies, achieving QA of our deliverables with shorter time to delivery is key as we bring new Weebit ReRAM IP modules to market.”

Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens' software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today's ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries, Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.