C language improves chip efficiency
10/15/2024 1:34:06 AM
In the interview of ICCAD 2023 held earlier, "I have been engaged in EDA industry for many years, and my personal goal in this industry has been to help the industry increase design efficiency, use a new design method to optimize the architecture and make RTL design quickly and efficiently."
As an enabler of the chip design industry, we hope to provide a one-stop platform for processor development by independently developing forward-looking technologies for the automation of dedicated processor design and verification. For a variety of application scenarios, the best matching software and hardware collaboration solutions are automatically generated. Providing new design methodologies, tool software and best practices for the growing chip design needs in China and globally.
"The tools we've developed so far are designed to bridge the gap between hardware and software in chip design."
Bridging the chip design gap
As we all know, in the traditional chip development process, although each link is linked, but they are mostly in charge of different developers, which leads to the overall process feedback and design iteration cycle is very slow. In the traditional design methodology, it starts from top to bottom, from system, algorithm to software, and finally to hardware. But the jump from software to hardware over the past two decades has been a big one, and there has always been a chasm in the design approach.
Over the past decade, chip companies have taken various approaches to this gap. For example, more and more semiconductor hardware companies have increased the number of software engineers, and software and hardware are actually merging little by little. But "treating the symptoms rather than the root cause", the gap between software and hardware still exists.
Today, with the increasing demand for computing power in terminals, the chip industry has undergone a new paradigm shift. On the one hand, the scale and complexity of chips are increasing, which brings new requirements to chip design. On the other hand, the market demand is changing, and the cycle of chip iteration is getting shorter and shorter, which makes chip design more difficult, and the cost of chip trial and error is getting higher and higher. How to design reliable chips efficiently becomes a top priority.
"From a technical point of view, we believe that there is a big trend in chip architecture, that is, heterogeneous multi-core, which will extend new design methodologies." In addition, with the emergence of RISC-V, the chip industry has unprecedented new opportunities and accompanying challenges.
With this in mind, the team hopes to use true design methodology to achieve design cost reduction and design functionality increase. According to reports, the positioning of itself focuses on the prototype design process, aiming to implement the system-level concept to the chip, to help customers achieve more, faster, better, and more efficient design and provide full process services.
The design team is organically combined by engineers from different fields, all of whom have rich experience in research and development, and can achieve the effect of '1+1>2' in practical work. On this basis, to serve China's semiconductor industry as the development focus, to help customers truly achieve production as the basis for testing their own value.
Among them, FARMStudio is a very competitive tool launched by the market demand.
C language to revolutionize chip design
According to reports, FARMStudio is a special processor generation tool described in C language and based on RISC-V basic instruction set, which can be widely used to customize processor solutions for vision, AI, communication, audio, DPU, industrial control and other fields, helping chip design companies to efficiently self-develop IP.
The tool is embedded with a DSA design paradigm for a wide range of applications, allowing customers to quickly integrate, optimize, and validate DSA processors, push the limits of traditional IP power efficiency, and adapt to continuous iterations of algorithms and products at a lower cost. In practical applications, FARMStudio enables engineers to explore computing architectures, optimize PPA, and quickly converge to the best design for intensive computing and complex data processing applications.
Developers in the chip industry should be aware that Verilog has dominated chip design for years, and so far no language seems to be able to shake it. But this time it can start from the C language, greatly improve the efficiency of chip design, in Wang Renrui's view, this is the company's innovation.
The design language can be divided into two levels: one level is the software execution scenario, based on the Turing machine model, and the other level is the hardware domain microarchitecture, based on the finite state machine. How to sink from a Turing machine to a finite state machine is what traditional hardware design architects and microarchitects do, a manual process, usually described in a design language like Verilog, the work is very tedious and requires a lot of verification work. "But with a custom processor to solve the acceleration, developers use FARMStudio™, only need to design arithmetic units (instructions), do not need to know how these instructions in the pipeline, do not need to know how to achieve the pipeline to cross, block." The most mature language for describing operations is C, and it works seamlessly with applications. That's why we chose C as our design language."
This does not mean that any C function can correspond to the arithmetic unit in the processor. FARMStudio™ provides the user with some simple rules in the C language environment, and uses the tool to improve the timely rule checking and circuit size feedback for the designer, so that he can design the instructions he wants in the C language in a fast iterative way. What is provided is not an all-encompassing logical description language.
The reason why I choose C language, first of all because it is the most commonly used language in embedded systems, can directly 'touch' the performance of the hardware, but also has the advantages of high-level languages such as international standards and assembler; Secondly, C language can also be directly simulated in x86 environment, with strong controllability; In addition, the use of C language can solve the difficulties of hardware and software integration design, which is conducive to the common understanding and debugging of software engineers and hardware engineers, break the barriers between software and hardware, shorten the design time and reduce the verification cost.
"As a tool supplier, we want to make tools that enable our customers to achieve the best energy efficiency, the highest computing power per unit area, the lowest power per unit area, and that is the iron law to measure whether our tools are achieving our goals." In fact, developers in the above-mentioned major fields can quickly find a balance in the above parameters after using this tool.
FARMStudio makes the chip design process usher in subversive changes, and truly realize the agile chip design. In combination with the latest integrated multi-level verification platform, it can double the design efficiency and accelerate product iteration.
FARMStudio is a C, algorithm to processor, algorithm to computing power implementation tool, and the launch of this tool is a new turning point, because in the next decade, how to use big data to create a variety of applications and customer experiences is the key to pushing our industry to the next stage.
"Focus on innovation, focus on the precipitation of technology, and solve the problem of a century, this is our insistence."
"The tools we've developed so far are designed to bridge the gap between hardware and software in chip design."
Bridging the chip design gap
As we all know, in the traditional chip development process, although each link is linked, but they are mostly in charge of different developers, which leads to the overall process feedback and design iteration cycle is very slow. In the traditional design methodology, it starts from top to bottom, from system, algorithm to software, and finally to hardware. But the jump from software to hardware over the past two decades has been a big one, and there has always been a chasm in the design approach.
Over the past decade, chip companies have taken various approaches to this gap. For example, more and more semiconductor hardware companies have increased the number of software engineers, and software and hardware are actually merging little by little. But "treating the symptoms rather than the root cause", the gap between software and hardware still exists.
Today, with the increasing demand for computing power in terminals, the chip industry has undergone a new paradigm shift. On the one hand, the scale and complexity of chips are increasing, which brings new requirements to chip design. On the other hand, the market demand is changing, and the cycle of chip iteration is getting shorter and shorter, which makes chip design more difficult, and the cost of chip trial and error is getting higher and higher. How to design reliable chips efficiently becomes a top priority.
"From a technical point of view, we believe that there is a big trend in chip architecture, that is, heterogeneous multi-core, which will extend new design methodologies." In addition, with the emergence of RISC-V, the chip industry has unprecedented new opportunities and accompanying challenges.
With this in mind, the team hopes to use true design methodology to achieve design cost reduction and design functionality increase. According to reports, the positioning of itself focuses on the prototype design process, aiming to implement the system-level concept to the chip, to help customers achieve more, faster, better, and more efficient design and provide full process services.
The design team is organically combined by engineers from different fields, all of whom have rich experience in research and development, and can achieve the effect of '1+1>2' in practical work. On this basis, to serve China's semiconductor industry as the development focus, to help customers truly achieve production as the basis for testing their own value.
Among them, FARMStudio is a very competitive tool launched by the market demand.
C language to revolutionize chip design
According to reports, FARMStudio is a special processor generation tool described in C language and based on RISC-V basic instruction set, which can be widely used to customize processor solutions for vision, AI, communication, audio, DPU, industrial control and other fields, helping chip design companies to efficiently self-develop IP.
The tool is embedded with a DSA design paradigm for a wide range of applications, allowing customers to quickly integrate, optimize, and validate DSA processors, push the limits of traditional IP power efficiency, and adapt to continuous iterations of algorithms and products at a lower cost. In practical applications, FARMStudio enables engineers to explore computing architectures, optimize PPA, and quickly converge to the best design for intensive computing and complex data processing applications.
Developers in the chip industry should be aware that Verilog has dominated chip design for years, and so far no language seems to be able to shake it. But this time it can start from the C language, greatly improve the efficiency of chip design, in Wang Renrui's view, this is the company's innovation.
The design language can be divided into two levels: one level is the software execution scenario, based on the Turing machine model, and the other level is the hardware domain microarchitecture, based on the finite state machine. How to sink from a Turing machine to a finite state machine is what traditional hardware design architects and microarchitects do, a manual process, usually described in a design language like Verilog, the work is very tedious and requires a lot of verification work. "But with a custom processor to solve the acceleration, developers use FARMStudio™, only need to design arithmetic units (instructions), do not need to know how these instructions in the pipeline, do not need to know how to achieve the pipeline to cross, block." The most mature language for describing operations is C, and it works seamlessly with applications. That's why we chose C as our design language."
This does not mean that any C function can correspond to the arithmetic unit in the processor. FARMStudio™ provides the user with some simple rules in the C language environment, and uses the tool to improve the timely rule checking and circuit size feedback for the designer, so that he can design the instructions he wants in the C language in a fast iterative way. What is provided is not an all-encompassing logical description language.
The reason why I choose C language, first of all because it is the most commonly used language in embedded systems, can directly 'touch' the performance of the hardware, but also has the advantages of high-level languages such as international standards and assembler; Secondly, C language can also be directly simulated in x86 environment, with strong controllability; In addition, the use of C language can solve the difficulties of hardware and software integration design, which is conducive to the common understanding and debugging of software engineers and hardware engineers, break the barriers between software and hardware, shorten the design time and reduce the verification cost.
"As a tool supplier, we want to make tools that enable our customers to achieve the best energy efficiency, the highest computing power per unit area, the lowest power per unit area, and that is the iron law to measure whether our tools are achieving our goals." In fact, developers in the above-mentioned major fields can quickly find a balance in the above parameters after using this tool.
FARMStudio makes the chip design process usher in subversive changes, and truly realize the agile chip design. In combination with the latest integrated multi-level verification platform, it can double the design efficiency and accelerate product iteration.
FARMStudio is a C, algorithm to processor, algorithm to computing power implementation tool, and the launch of this tool is a new turning point, because in the next decade, how to use big data to create a variety of applications and customer experiences is the key to pushing our industry to the next stage.
"Focus on innovation, focus on the precipitation of technology, and solve the problem of a century, this is our insistence."
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