Speeding up Chiplet-Based Design Through Hardware Emulation

The first chiplets focused summit took place last month. So many accomplished speakers gave keynote talks on what direction should and would the Chiplets ecosystem evolution take. Corigine presented the keynote on what direction hardware emulation should and would evolve for speeding up chiplet- based designs. During a pre-conference tutorial session, Corigine shared customer-based case studies to highlight how Corigine’s MimicPro prototyping and emulation solutions addressed challenges introduced by chiplet-based designs.

The Chiplet Summit introduced a new tag line, “Chiplets Make Huge Chips Happen.” With large monolithic SoCs losing favor in the face of Moore’s Law slowing down, the new tag line highlights how chiplets make large SoCs possible. Of course, tag lines by themselves don’t make things happen. It takes an ecosystem, the companies within the ecosystem and the people at these companies that make things happen. One of those companies is Corigine. Corigine is a fabless semiconductor company that designs and delivers leading edge EDA tools.

Corigine presented insightful thoughts and discussed their innovative solutions during various sessions at the conference. If you missed these sessions, the following is a synthesis of the salient points from those sessions.

Chiplet-based Design Benefits, Challenges and Solutions

Aside from the economic benefit derived from an yield perspective compared to a large monolithic SoC, chiplets bring many additional benefits to the table. These benefits are namely, architectural partitioning, enabling of re-use, time-to-market and product family scalability. Of course, there are many challenges too. The following diagram shows the continuum of barriers when implementing a chiplet-based chip.

With Corigine’s focus on addressing the front-end barriers, the following are its learnings during the course of its chiplet-based data processing unit (DPU) chip development work.

Chiplets-based Chip Development and Emulation Requirements

A key consideration for a chiplet is the decision on where to place its various I/O ports. This of course is driven by the system requirements such as machine language (ML) processing functionality and datapath SIMD or MIMD organization. With an effective architectural decomposition of the system, the next set of requirements revolves around the interconnect’s attributes. The interconnects should be open, extensible and backwards compatible.  For example, as UCIe is being driven as a standard for the D2D interconnects, as the UCIe standard evolves, UCIe V2.0 should also support V1.0 based chiplets.

With the interconnects addressed, the next requirement is a pre-tapeout platform to support integration and verification of heterogeneous chiplets. The platform should be able to support a very large number of transistors and ensure IP protection and segmentation. Finally, none of the above matter if silicon and software co-development cannot be accomplished rapidly and successfully. The co-development platform must provide built-in logic analyzers with complex trigger mechanism capabilities to insert waveforms during software debug.

Corigine’s MimicPro Prototyping and Emulation Solutions

To address the co-development platform, Corigine developed a series of FPGA-based prototyping and emulation platforms by working with the silicon and software teams developing their own chiplet-based DPU chip. These platforms are essentially combined prototyping and emulation systems that can provide faster software turnaround time. They include functionality for collecting and analyzing data and introducing design-for-test and design-for-manufacturing features, thereby enabling software verification before tapeout.

The MimicPro solutions deliver an order-of-magnitude performance improvement over traditional emulators of similar class. Corigine’s patented distributed routing and fine-grain multi-user clocking enable linear performance scaling irrespective of the size of a block being emulated. The dedicated scalable clock/routing infrastructure enables higher utilization of resources for logic emulation.

Corigine MimicPro was initially optimized for performance and scalability, enhanced with visibility, portability and security. It essentially combines rich debugging features and confidential information protection and 10-100MHz level performance of prototyping. It continues to grow with Corigine in house SmartNIC / Data Processing Unit chiplet design.

The following chart showcases the resource utilization efficiency of a MimicPro system in real life use by a SmartNIC.

The following is what Corigine is addressing for chiplets with its MimicPro solutions.

MIMIC Product Information  

MimicPro™ 32

The Corigine MimicPro Prototyping System provides performance and speed for ASIC and software development for both enterprise and cloud operation, with utmost security and scalability. The MimicPro solution provides scalability from 4 to 32 FPGAs. The system also provides easy upgradeability to the latest available FPGAs. The Corigine MimicPro system is the industry’s next-generation platform for automating prototyping including manual partitioning operations, while providing a system-level view for optimum partitioning and performance. In addition, the MimicPro system adds deep local debug capabilities providing much greater visibility and faster elimination of bugs. Thus, the MimicPro system reduces the overall development time and cost-effectively accelerates software development without the dependence on costly emulation.

For more detailed MimicPro™-32 information, you can refer to Corigine’s product page.

MimicPro-32

MimicTurbo™ GT Card

Corigine MimicTurbo GT card based on the UltraScale+™ VU19P FPGA is designed to simplify the deployment of FPGA based prototyping at the desktop. The card can support up to 48 million ASIC gates each, has onboard DDR4 component memory and can be configured to operate with additional connected MimicTurbo GT cards. The card supports 64 GTY transceivers (16 Quads) along with the essential I/O interfaces.

Corigine MimicTurbo GT board is available from the Xilinx website. You can find more detailed product information on AMD/Xilinx FPGA-based Corigine MimicTurbo GT card on this page.

MimicTurbo GT Card

Corigine MimicTurbo GT 1 FPAG board is available from the Xilinx website. You can find more detailed product information on Xilinx FPGA-based Corigine MimicTurbo GT card on this page.

Corigine at DVCon US 2023

Corigine is at DVCon demonstrating its MimicPro-32 this month.
Time: February 27 th – March 1 st
Location: DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel San Jose.
Registration: https://dvcon.org/registration/

Also Read:

Alphawave Semi at the Chiplet Summit

Who will Win in the Chiplet War?

The Era of Chiplets and Heterogeneous Integration: Challenges and Emerging Solutions to Support 2.5D and 3D Advanced Packaging

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