Innexis Product Suite: Driving Shift Left in IC Design and Systems Development

At the heart of the shift-left strategy is the goal of moving traditionally late-stage tasks—such as software development, validation, and optimization—earlier in the design process. This proactive approach allows teams to identify and resolve issues before they escalate, reducing costly rework and shortening the overall development timeline. As IC designs become more complex and software demands increase, shifting left becomes critical. Early defect detection, quicker iterations, and the ability to validate performance and power early in the design process help prevent delays and reduce costs. Ultimately, this approach ensures a higher quality product, faster time-to-market, and a more efficient development cycle.

Siemens EDA recently launched its Innexis Product Suite, a comprehensive set of tools designed to reshape the development and validation of integrated circuits (ICs) and complex systems. Building on the success of its Veloce™ hardware-assisted verification and validation system, the Innexis product suite is engineered to support shift-left software development. And its integration with Veloce ensures that both hardware and software are validated in parallel throughout the development cycle. By enabling early software testing, continuous validation, and rapid debugging across virtual and hardware environments, Innexis complements Veloce to optimize the entire verification process.

The following insights were gained from the various talks at the Innexis Product launch event.

The Innexis Product Suite

The product suite is specifically built to enable this shift-left methodology across various stages of the design process. The suite includes several components, each offering unique capabilities and use cases but all aligned with the goal of accelerating development and enabling early validation of both hardware and software.

Innexis Developer Pro

The Innexis Developer Pro plays a pivotal role in supporting the continuous development flow from virtual models to hybrid systems and eventually to full RTL simulations. This tool offers a seamless platform for hardware-software co-development, validation, and analysis. Developers can work across virtual, hybrid, and RTL environments, ensuring that designs are continuously tested and optimized from the very start. By enabling early power and performance analysis, Innexis Developer Pro helps teams identify issues early in the cycle, preventing rework later on. It supports a wide range of use cases, such as enabling pre-silicon validation and accelerating the creation of complex SoCs with heterogeneous cores.

Samsung shared with the audience, how the Innexis suite has accelerated their software development by providing a configurable reference platform that mimics a Samsung A75-based CPU subsystem and integrates Samsung GPU IP. With the Innexis stack, Android boots in under 10 minutes, compared to 20+ hours on traditional emulators, and Veloce Strato enables faster pre-silicon performance analysis by executing GPU RTL. Samsung’s successful shift-left with Innexis has streamlined their development process, enabling software development as early as the first RTL milestone, with RTL to Innexis readiness in just one week, pre-verified software stacks, and a configurable testbench for efficient custom driver integration and testing.

Innexis Architecture Native Acceleration (ANA)

For teams looking to develop software early in the process, Innexis ANA provides a high-speed, cloud-based platform. By utilizing Arm-based servers, ANA enables the execution of software workloads at speeds up to 2-4 GHz, significantly faster than traditional simulation-based platforms. The cloud-native environment offers scalable resources and enables team collaboration by allowing the sharing of models and workloads across different locations. With Innexis ANA, engineers can develop and test software long before RTL or silicon are available, optimizing performance and identifying software defects early. It also integrates seamlessly with other parts of the suite, enhancing the shift-left workflow and ensuring continuous development without delays.

Arm shared with the audience, Innexis ANA benchmark numbers that demonstrate 50-100X boot time performance improvement when using realistic software workloads compared to a QEMU-based Instruction Set Simulator (ISS) virtual platform.

Innexis Virtual System Interconnect (VSI)

Another key component, Innexis VSI, facilitates the creation of system-level digital twins. This tool integrates multi-behavioral models of various subsystems, such as sensors, ECUs, and environmental models, to simulate the interactions within a complete system. By providing visualization and analysis capabilities, VSI helps engineers understand system behavior before physical prototypes are available. It is especially useful in industries like automotive, where system-level validation is critical for complex designs such as autonomous driving systems or electric powertrains. VSI can also be cloud-enabled, offering scalable simulations and real-time collaboration, which accelerates the design process and ensures all system components function together as intended.

Innexis Product Suite Benefits

The Innexis suite’s benefits are far-reaching. First, it helps accelerate time-to-market by enabling earlier testing and identification of defects, thus reducing design iterations and re-spins. Second, it offers cost savings by allowing issues to be addressed early, preventing expensive last-minute fixes. Third, it fosters collaboration by enabling teams to work seamlessly across geographic locations, sharing models, data, and workflows in real time. Finally, Innexis contributes to performance optimization by providing tools to run realistic software workloads early, ensuring that power and performance benchmarks are met before hardware is finalized.

Shifting Left Using AWS

The shift-left approach using Software and Digital Twin through virtual Hardware in Loop (vHIL) testing in the cloud accelerates the development cycle by enabling silicon virtualization before target hardware is available.

AWS highlighted to the audience, how Arm’s validated IP subsystems and AWS’s scalable cloud infrastructure ensure that teams have access to high-performance, cloud-native tools, enabling them to scale their development efforts quickly and efficiently. With Innexis ANA offering cloud-based benchmarking and software profiling, these capabilities ensure that developers can test and validate their designs in real-world conditions long before physical hardware is available. By utilizing Arm64-based Graviton instances on AWS, native execution of embedded software offers performance and efficiency gains over traditional emulation, allowing early software development before silicon is available. This approach reduces reliance on upfront HIL testing, enables early issue discovery, and offers scalable cloud-based resources for improved software quality and faster development cycles.

Summary

The Innexis Product Suite represents a paradigm shift in IC and systems development. By enabling shift-left in hardware/software co-design, early defect detection, and comprehensive system-level validation, Innexis empowers engineers to meet the challenges of modern IC design and accelerate the development of complex systems. With its cloud-native capabilities, powerful simulation tools, and integration with Veloce, Innexis provides the tools necessary to deliver high-quality products faster, more cost-effectively, and with higher reliability.

To learn more, visit

The Innexis solution page.

Press announcement page.

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