Synopsys Touts Smart “DesignDash” To Help Accelerate Chip Projects

by | Jun 10, 2022 | In the News

Many chip design teams use internally developed tools or a mix of vendor tools to manage the development workflow. Now Synopsys is applying ML and Big Data analytics to inform a comprehensive dashboard to improve productivity and the end-to-end design process.

Every chip design team has probably watched this movie before: after months of hard work designing a new product, the team has suddenly lost the recipe, and the latest simulation run veers from the steady progress the team has been making towards tape-out. What went wrong? And how can the team quickly recover to stay on schedule?

To help teams avoid a sequel to this all-too-common experience, Synopsys has announced DesignDash, a new platform that can streamline management of designing complex SoCs. DesignDash is a complementary product to Synopsys’ Digital Design Family and Synopsys DSO.ai, providing a comprehensive project data-visibility and ML-guided design optimization to improve productivity and project predictability.
What is DesignDash?

In effect, DesignDash does for the design process what the Synopsys Silicon Lifecycle Management tool, Silicon Dash, does for post-deployment asset management. It provides a 360-degree view of all design activities for faster decision making and a deeper understanding of run-to-run, design-to-design and project-to-project trends in automatically generated data from previous and current experiences.

DesignDash acts as a hub for design data and for providing guidance to the design teams

DesignDash acts as a hub for design data and for providing guidance to the design teams Synopsys

With customers facing massive growth in system complexity, shrinking market windows and an increasingly challenging resource landscape, Synopsys undertook a multi-year and multi-disciplinary approach to address the problem. Think of it this way: DesignDash will help find the best mountain ranges (design problem spaces) to tackle and improve, while DSO.ai will find the highest mountain in that range to optimize power, performance and area. And instead of writing and managing custom tools, design teams can focus on job #1: designing better products.

DesignDash consolidates project data and helps designers and managers improve productivity and the overall design process.

DesignDash consolidates project data and helps designers and managers improve productivity and the overall design process. Synopsys

According to Synopsys, the cloud-optimized Synopsys DesignDash design solution enhances productivity by:

  • Providing extensive real-time design status through powerful visualizations and interactive dashboards.
  • Deploying deep analytics and machine learning to extract and reveal actionable understanding from vast volumes of structured and unstructured EDA metrics and tool-flow data.
  • Quickly classifying design trends, identifying design limitations, providing guided root-cause analysis and delivering flow consumable, prescriptive resolutions.

Does it work?

“As a leading supplier of SoCs that are powering and transforming numerous high-impact industries, we pride ourselves on being able to push the limits of achievable device performance while also accelerating our customers’ time-to-market,” said Hiroshi Ikeda, director, Methodology Development Office, Global Development Group at Socionext. “We’re very excited by the Synopsys DesignDash analytics solution as a systematic way to capture, consume and evaluate our vast design activity in a scalable way, enabling us to share and transfer expert knowledge across our worldwide design teams to enhance productivity and efficiency.”

Conclusions

Synopsys continues to provide leading-edge tools to help its customers focus on the job of designing, taking on the management of the design process, the optimization of the design, and ongoing life cycle management to improve product quality and durability in the field. We continue to be impressed by the comprehensive role the company envisions for itself under co-CEO Aart de Geus, and the company’s innovative approach to supporting the design teams in the management of complex integrated circuits. They have serious competition, to be sure, but Synopsys keeps knocking the ball out of the park.