TSMC

Avnet ASIC Team Launches Ultra-Low-Power Design Services for TSMC’s 4nm Process Node

Posted on by Techtime

Avnet ASIC, a division of Avnet Silica, an Avnet company (NASDAQ: AVT), today announced that it has launched its new ultra-low-power design services for TSMC’s cutting-edge 4nm and below process technologies. These services are designed to enable customers to achieve exceptional power efficiency and performance in their high-performance applications, such as blockchain and AI edge computing. TSMC is the world’s leading silicon foundry and Avnet ASIC division is a leading provider of ASIC and SoC full turnkey solutions.

The new design services leverage a comprehensive approach to address the challenges of operating at extreme low-voltage conditions in the 4nm and below nodes. This includes recharacterizing standard cells for lower voltages, performing early RTL exploration to optimize power, performance, and area (PPA) tradeoffs, implementing an optimized clock tree, and utilizing transistor-level simulations to enhance the power optimization process.

The Avnet ASIC team built a full-scale technical A-Z approach to enable PPA optimization of high-performance chips working at extremely low voltage and proved it in TSMC’s 4nm process. Performance, dynamic and leakage power estimations have been confirmed by post-silicon validation.

The customer defined the board solution and chip implementation concept, requirements, and executed front-end design based on library characterization for near-threshold voltage operation. Avnet ASIC then executed this design to meet aggressive market targets, enabling the ultra-low-power performance of the customer’s application.

“One of the industry challenges today is to optimize application performance by choosing the correct technology to meet customer needs,” said Pavel Vilk, GM and Head of Engineering at Avnet ASIC.

“TSMC’s 4nm process provides a great opportunity to save power and area without compromising target performance. However, operating at low voltages puts a lot of effort on voltage drop, which needs to be optimized through a holistic solution of board-package-chip design. Being a TSMC Value Chain Aggregator and a full turnkey partner to customers, we believe this new achievement could bring great value in helping our customers deliver their products to market competitively.”

The new announcement follows the announcement of the Avnet ASIC team from February that it has been appointed as a Value Chain Aggregator (VCA) by TSMC. The appointment positions the Avnet ASIC team as a channel for TSMC ASIC customers, offering a full turnkey solution from design inception to layout and mass production, implemented in TSMC’s most advanced silicon processes.

The collaboration signifies a landmark agreement within Avnet, enhancing the offerings by combining the strong technology of TSMC with the ASIC design and manufacturing capabilities of Avnet ASIC. This initiative enables access to TSMC’s most advanced silicon processes for customers, establishing Avnet ASIC as a channel partner of TSMC for comprehensive ASIC SoC solutions.

[Photo credit: Eyal Touge]

Avnet ASIC selected to become a Value Chain Aggregator by TSMC

Posted on by Techtime

Avnet ASIC Israel Ltd, (AAI) a leading provider of ASIC and SoC full turnkey solutions and a business division of Avnet Silica, an Avnet company (NASDAQ: AVT), has been appointed as a Value Chain Aggregator (VCA) by TSMC, the world’s leading silicon foundry. The appointment positions Avnet ASIC Israel Ltd as a channel for TSMC ASIC customers, offering a full turnkey solution from design inception to layout and mass production, implemented in TSMC’s most advanced silicon processes.

The collaboration signifies a landmark agreement within Avnet, enhancing the offerings by combining the strong technology of TSMC with the ASIC design and manufacturing capabilities of Avnet ASIC. This best-of-class initiative enables access to TSMC’s most advanced silicon processes for customers, establishing Avnet ASIC as a channel partner of TSMC for comprehensive ASIC SoC solutions.

“We are pleased to welcome Avnet ASIC Israel Ltd. as a VCA to TSMC’s offering. Their outstanding track record with TSMC’s technologies and expertise in design, production, and diverse applications such as automotive and AI, is valuable to us, and is an instrument to bring exceptional value to our customers and help expand our market “, said Paul de Bot, General Manager of TSMC EMEA.

TSMC’s VCA program is designed to extend TSMC’s reach, serving a diverse range of customers. As a VCA partner, Avnet ASIC integrates design enablement within TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform® (OIP), offering services at each link in the IC value chain, including IP development, design, backend, wafer manufacturing, assembly, and testing.

“Our longstanding 20 years partnership and collaboration with TSMC is a testament to our unwavering commitment to innovation and excellence. This further solidifies our position in the industry enabling us to bring competitive advantage to our mutual customers by securing faster time to market and safe path to mass production”, said Yulia Milshtein, GM, Head of Business at Avnet ASIC Israel.

Pavel Vilk, GM, Head of Engineering, added, “With a rich track of record of numerous first time successful design projects in all process nodes down to the cutting-edge 4nm, showcasing a profound understanding of TSMC’s offerings, we are further amplifying our services in domains like AI, Automotive, HPC, Data Centers and more and we are ready to support our mutual customers addressing these state of the art applications”.

Hailo Released Samples of 26TOPS AI Processor

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Hailo from Tel Aviv announced the the first samples of its Hailo-8 Deep Learning Processor were delivered to selected partners, mainly from the automotive industry. To allow running  deep learning applications on the edge devices, Hailo re-designed the main pillars of computer architecture: memory, control, and compute and added  a comprehensive Software Development Kit (SDK) co-developed with the hardware.

The result is a 16 nano-meter chip produced by TSMC capable of delivering up to 26 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS). The company said that during ResNet-50 benchmark tests, Hailo-8 outperformed Nvidia’s Xavier AGX and consumed almost 20 times less power while performing the same tasks. Hailo was established in 2017 by former members of the Israel Defense Forces’  intelligence unit.

AI Beyond the Cloud

Its deep learning processor is designed to run complex algorithms  on autonomous vehicles, smart cameras, smartphones, drones, AR/VR platforms, and wearable devices. The company said it is now working in cooperation with tier-1 automotive companies on advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), and with major players in smart city and smart home markets, to empower powerful IoT devices.

“In recent years, we’ve witnessed an ever-growing list of applications unlocked by deep learning, which were made possible thanks to server-class GPUs,” said Orr Danon, CEO of Hailo. “However,  there is a crucial need for an analogous architecture that replaces processors of the past, enabling deep learning to run devices at the edge. Hailo’s chip was designed from the ground up to do just that.”