Perforce at DAC, Unifying Software and Silicon Across the Ecosystem

As the new name reflects, chip and system design were a major focus at DAC. So was the role of AI to enable those activities. But getting an AI-enabled design flow to work effectively across chip, subsystem and system-level design presents many significant challenges. One important one is effectively managing the vast amount of data used for these activities. There was one company at DAC that is quietly enabling these efforts. It’s reach is impressive. I had the opportunity to speak with two of the leaders at Perforce at DAC to see how the company is unifying software and silicon across the ecosystem.

The Big Picture

These folks provided a great overview of what Perforce is doing, with some important context about the impact of the work.

Vishal Moondhra, VP of Solutions Engineering at Perforce. Vishal has over 20 years of experience in digital design and verification. His career includes innovative startups like LGT and Montalvo, and large multinationals such as Intel and Sun. In 2008, Vishal co-founded Missing Link Tools, which built the industry’s first comprehensive Design Verification management solution, bringing together all aspects of verification management into a single platform. Missing Link was acquired by Methodics Inc. in 2012 and by Perforce in 2020.

Mike Dreyer, Director, Partners and Alliances at Perforce. Mike has nearly 30 years of experience in sales and partner management across several companies and industries. He has been with the Perforce organization for 10 years. Prior to Perforce, he managed global strategic accounts at Mentor Graphics.

We began by discussing what’s involved in uniting software and silicon in the context of system design. A big issue is managing the vast amount of data generated by AI systems across the entire system development flow. Handling the sheer volume of information is one challenge. Keeping track of what metadata version belongs to what IP block version is another. Without solid version control, sophisticated AI algorithms could be making decisions with the wrong or inconsistent data sets, creating deep and hard-to-find problems.

Vishal and Mike explained that this is an area where Perforce is helping many design teams across many organizations with two key products.

Perforce IPLM provides a hierarchical data model that unifies software and semiconductor metadata. This provides immutable traceability from requirements through design to verification. When deployed across the enterprise, a foundation for an intelligent AI-powered platform capable of real-time data analytics to drive informed design decisions is created.  It was pointed out that IPLM can manage all kinds of IP across a system design, from an AND gate to an airline seat. The implications of unifying this much of the system design is quite significant.

Perforce P4 delivers high-performance data management and version control. P4 provides the infrastructure for fast, scalable, and secure collaboration across globally distributed teams. I’ve worked on large design projects across several countries, and I can tell you the most sophisticated design flow will simply fall apart if the data management backbone can’t keep up.

These capabilities are deployed today across a wide range of companies, design teams and projects. You could say that Perforce is quietly enabling the AI revolution. Citing names is always tricky in these discussions, but Vishal and Mike were able to share an impressive list of customers that includes Micron, Analog Devices, SK Hynix, Skyworks, and Cirrus Logic.

The Siemens Connection

There was another example of Perforce collaboration across the ecosystem in a press release leading up to DAC, Perforce Partners with Siemens for Software-Defined, AI-Powered, Silicon-Enabled Design.  Described as a “partnership to unify software and semiconductor development”, the release describes how Perforce Software, the DevOps company for global teams seeking AI innovation at scale, is partnering with Siemens Digital Industries Software to transform how smart, connected products are designed and developed. Siemens was part of many conversations at DAC related to system design and AI. I covered the company’s announcement of the Siemens EDA AI System on SemiWiki here.

The work announced in the Perforce press release provides important infrastructure to enable forward-looking efforts such as this. The press release provides a good perspective for the impact of this work as follows:

As software and semiconductor teams converge around shared tools and methodologies, there is a critical need for a cohesive platform for concurrent design, development, and verification. This approach enables greater agility in architectural decision-making, accelerates verification, and ensures full traceability from initial requirements through to implementation and validation. Perforce’s IPLM and P4 solutions provide the foundation for this unified development environment.

To Learn More

It is clear that chip design and system design are converging. It is also clear that AI will be a big part of that design revolution. If these trends are impacting your work, it is essential to understand how the pieces work together and where critical enabling technology fits. Perforce is a key supplier of that enabling technology. You can read the full text of the Siemens partnership press release here. And you can learn more about how Perforce IPLM and P4 work together here.  And that’s how Perforce is unifying software and silicon across the ecosystem.