The Top Secret Engineering Team at Cadence

30 Nov 2023 • 4 minute read

The Silicon Engineering Team – Mission Impossible Superstars

AI Chip Services

In the fast-paced world of silicon design, staying ahead of the curve is paramount. The journey can be exciting and daunting for companies new to leading-edge technology in this dynamic landscape. That's where the experts at Cadence come in. With a proven track record of success, Cadence offers unparalleled expertise and guidance to ensure your technology projects meet industry-leading standards and stay on schedule. By partnering with Cadence, customers at the vanguard of the silicon design industry can navigate this complex field with confidence, assuring the success of their projects and maintaining their competitive edge.

When you want to push the limits of existing methodologies, foundry technology, software tools, 2.5D and 3D-ICs, or anything else that will get you the capabilities needed in your next-generation chips, turn to Cadence’s Mission Impossible superstars—the Silicon Engineering Team. They tackle the hard stuff, so you don’t have to take all the risks alone. It’s all about enablement for this team. Their big goal: To help our customers achieve success in emerging technologies with resources beyond the typical design projects.

Getting Very Close to the Customer

Cadence's Silicon Engineering Team creates great success stories by thoroughly understanding customer needs and finding the right resources to solve those problems quickly. They have the experience to architect and design the best silicon architecture and the right connections with Cadence’s full family of resources, from the software R&D teams, IP libraries, and foundry partners, to push the limits of the technology and tailor a solution for true customer success.

For example, a company with a superconducting requirement needed to achieve designs that required tool support beyond what our software could accomplish at the time, and our Mission Impossible Team went to work. They collaborated with R&D to tune and modify Cadence software and develop new design methodologies. This team worked with the software R&D resources and the foundry on what worked, what did not, and what really mattered. The team developed the right mix of software tools and process design kit (PDK) enablement for a successful solution. The Mission Impossible Team loves to tackle such projects.

The Silicon Engineering Team supports leading-edge customers who need specific expertise or senior-level resources to deliver their projects with high confidence. The team helps customers who require the best tools and methodologies in the latest process nodes using the most recent AI design techniques. They are always pushing the limits for customers, trying to run at a frequency never done before. With the right tools, emulation capabilities, physical design expertise, IP integration skills, mixed-signal techniques, and more, the Silicon Engineering Team is ready to face the next big challenge.

Sometimes, the team is called to help with design migration from one process node to another. It sounds simple, but we all know how challenging design migration can be! Especially for older analog mixed-signal products.

Some system companies and fabless semiconductor companies rely on the Silicon Engineering Team to tape out their complex products. They may be running front-end tools but have no back-end physical design expertise. Our team functions like an in-house design team, working directly with the foundry. This gives us practical experience, enhancing our design tools and foundry relationships.

Close Relationships with Foundries

Strong relationships with foundries are a key success factor for this team. We enable foundries to successfully utilize our software to the point where we’re co-developing. It’s essential to have the right mix of software driving fab development and process technology driving our software. By collaborating with customers, we help them achieve unique successes that stand out in the marketplace.

The Silicon Engineering Team has deep expertise in Design Technology Co-Optimization (DTCO), a key capability to keep scaling down chip area in advanced process nodes. We work with foundries to benchmark their process technologies and advise them on improvements that will make a difference.

Working on process technologies three to five years out from high-volume manufacturing helps explore technology options. For example, DTCO was used to examine buried power rails, putting them into silicon rather than keeping them in the interconnect. The outcome of this tradeoff is not immediately obvious, and it is impossible to tell without building cell libraries and placing and routing some designs.

Strong Expertise in IP and Cadence Tools

The expertise of this Silicon Engineering Team extends to integration challenges for IP as well as knowledge of the entire Cadence design tool software suite, including emulation and prototyping.

The team has deep experience integrating Arm® cores into SoC designs and meeting power, performance, and area (PPA) targets. The team can push complex Arm designs forward, from architecture, emulation, verification, and physical design, to meet challenging goals.

Today’s chip designs contain multiple IP, and members of the Mission Impossible Team have experience with the most challenging, from high-speed SerDes, chiplet and D2D connectivity for high-performance computing, and much more. The team uses Cadence Verification IP, especially Accelerated Verification IP (AVIP), to bring entirely new performance levels to verification projects. The team also understands the best way to integrate Tensilica processor IP into your designs. Whether your application is automotive, radar, infotainment, AI, or any complex task, the team is ready to help.

Designing Next-Generation Palladium Chips

Who do you think designs Cadence’s own hardware? This is the dream team that Cadence uses for its own extremely high-performance design projects, like the Palladium Z2 platform. This practical design experience is just one example of how the team manages customer challenges.

Need Help with Your Next Challenging Project?

Our Mission Impossible—or Silicon Engineering—Team is ready to talk to you, help you evaluate your design goals, and see if it fits. When you have the toughest challenges, now you know who to call.