Arm announces Neoverse design partnership

A few months ago, Arm Holdings introduced the Neoverse Complete Subsystem (CSS), designed to accelerate development of Neoverse-based systems. Now it has launched Arm Total Design, a series of tools and services to help accelerate development of Neoverse CSS designs.

Partners within the Arm Total Design ecosystem gain preferential access to Neoverse CSS, which can enable them to reduce time to market and lower the costs associated with building custom silicon. This ecosystem covers all stages of silicon development. It aims to make specialized solutions based on Arm Neoverse widely available across various infrastructure domains, such as AI, cloud, networking, and edge computing.

Partners get pre-integrated and validated intellectual property (IP) and electronic design automation (EDA) tools from partners like Alphawave Semi, Cadence, Rambus, and Synopsys, and design services from partners like ADTechnology, Broadcom, Capgemini, Faraday, Socionext, and Sondrel.

Foundry partners, including Intel Foundry Services and TSMC, provide technology optimized for advanced process nodes while leading infrastructure firmware providers like AMI offer commercial software and firmware support.

Arm is also involved in supporting emerging chiplet technology, where chips are broken up into smaller components rather than one big, monolithic piece of silicon. The last thing the industry needs is fragmentation, so having a single source of multi-die chiplet SoC designs will ensure compatibility and avoid fragmentation of the market, increasing accessibility to custom, workload-optimized silicon.

“Arm Total Design means that ASIC design houses can have designs started and on-the-shelf ready to go, IP vendors can pre-integrate, pre-validate, and pre-optimize advanced IP for Neoverse CSS, EDA partners can ensure seamless support into the most advanced tools and flows in order to streamline SoC design, commercial firmware solutions can be developed long before silicon availability, and Neoverse CSS designs will be specifically optimized to take advantage of leading-edge process nodes,” said Mohamed Awad, senior vice president and general manager of the infrastructure line of business at Arm, in a blog post announcing the initiative.

Arm Total Design is a different way of delivering processors to the market. While many of these partners also work with Intel and AMD, it’s still the Intel or AMD show, and they drive everything in the development process, with a little bit of support from tool vendors and other partners.

Here, the Arm ecoverse is made up of much smaller players than those two x86 giants, and custom silicon developers need to bring partners to bear because they can’t do it alone.

So while Intel and AMD products are individual efforts to the companies, Arm Total Design is more of a group effort with partners linking arms in collaboration to help accelerate development and be competitive with the x86 players. It should help Neoverse CSS increase their delivery time and improve innovation.