Arm Holdings Ltd. is building on the launch of its Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystems earlier this year as today the British chip design firm announced a new ecosystem called Arm Total Design that will help companies building customized system-on-chip designs to access industry expertise and accelerate those efforts.

When it unveiled Arm Neoverse CSS in the summer, Arm explained that it was providing enterprises with a lower-risk path to custom silicon for infrastructure. Arm Neoverse CSS makes the chip designer’s technology available to customers in a more convenient way, with pre-integrated and pre-verified chip blueprints designed for various kinds of data center use cases. Customers can use those blueprints and refine them to create customized chips for more specific, internal workloads.

In this way, Arm Neoverse CSS can lower the cost of development and accelerate time to market for customized SoCs that are tailor made for very specific workloads.

With today’s announcement, Arm is now lining up an ecosystem of partners to help customers design and build their customized Arm Neoverse CSS chips in the fastest time possible. Announced at the 2023 OCP Global Summit today, Arm Total Design brings together a range of chip industry leaders, including leading ASIC designers, intellectual property vendors, electronic design automation tool providers, chip foundries and firmware developers, enabling customers to easily tap their expertise. At the same time, Arm Total Design partners will benefit from preferential access to Neoverse CSS.

Within the Arm Total Design ecosystem, customers can access pre-integrated and validated IP and EDA tools from partners such as Alphawave IP Inc., Cadence Design Systems Inc. and Synopsys Inc. to accelerate chip design and integrate essential components such as memory, peripherals and security, Arm said. Those efforts will be supported by design services from IP providers including ADTechnology Inc., Broadcom Inc., Capgemini SE and Socionext Inc., as well as chip foundry partners such as Intel Corp. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. Finally, the ecosystem is supported by commercial software and firmware from providers such as American Megatrends International LLC.

Dan Kochpatcharin, head of design infrastructure management at TSMC, said Arm Neoverse CSS, combined with TSMC’s most advanced chip manufacturing process, will enable the creation of more advanced and power-efficient chips for workloads including AI, high-performance computing and mobile applications.

Arm said its close collaboration with this initial group of semiconductor industry leaders will empower everyone to innovate more rapidly with Neoverse CSS. With Arm Total Design, ASIC designers can get various designs on the shelf and ready to go, Arm said. The IP providers can pre-integrate, pre-validate and pre-optimize advanced IP for Neoverse CSS, while EDA tool providers can ensure their most advanced tools are ready to support an endless stream of new Neoverse CSS-based chip designs. Finally, the commercial firmware solutions can be developed before the silicon is manufactured, ensuring everything is ready prior to availability of the new platforms.

“Arm Total Design provides the foundation needed to rapidly develop SoCs based on Arm architectures,” said Paul Cunningham, senior vice president and general manager of the System & Verification Group at Cadence. “Through our expanded collaboration with Arm, customers have access to a wide range of tools and solutions to assist with developing Neoverse based designs.”

Image: Arm