Is your latest NVMe design taking advantage of Streams? Adoption of this new NVMe technology is gaining momentum with Synopsys customers. Streams are part of the new, optional, Directives feature introduced in the NVMe 1.3 specification. Directives allow the passing of metadata between hosts and controllers via existing NVMe commands. Streams are unique in that they are the only I/O based Directive available in the 1.3 specification.
Ever since Arm released the Arm® AMBA® 5 AHB5 protocol specifications, questions have arisen among users in the design and verification community—”Why AHB5?”, “What is new in AHB5?” etc. This post initiates a short series of blogs in which we will address these questions and introduce the new features of AMBA 5 AHB5.
Posted in AMBA, Automotive, Interconnects, Processor Subsystems, Uncategorized
In June 2017, PCI-SIG announced the new PCI Express 5.0 specification, at the PCI-SIG DevCon. The new version of the specification doubled bit rate to 32GT/s per lane providing about 128GB/s bandwidth for a x16 Link (16 lanes). The chart below provides a comparison of bit-rate and bandwidth for the different PCIe Generations.
Posted in Automotive, Data Center, DesignWare, PCIe
This year, MIPI DevCon was held in Bangalore, India and Hsinchu City, Taiwan in October. Synopsys MIPI protocol experts hosted several demos at each conference showcasing implementation experiences, use cases and application examples within mobile, automotive, IoT and mixed reality applications.
Posted in Audio, Automotive, C-PHY, Camera, CSI, D-PHY, I2S, I3C, Interface Subsystems, MIPI, Mobile SoC, MPHY, SlimBus, Soundwire, Unipro
Higher storage performance at a lower cost can create a bottleneck in the design of storage devices. In order to achieve higher performance, devices must use on chip DRAM, which adds to the overall cost. This is where Unified Memory Extension (UME), a JEDEC specification, comes into the picture. It is defined as extension to the JEDEC UFS (Universal Flash Storage) specification. JEDEC UFS device uses NAND flash technology for data storage. Unified Memory (UM) allows users to use part of the host memory as the device’s internal memory. Since the host memory is already available in large capacities, this mechanism provides a much bigger space for the device to use as a Write Buffer (WB) cache or to store information such as Logical to Physical (L2P) address translation tables. The UM area is physically located on the host side but ultimately belongs to the device, thereby replacing the device-integrated RAM, and reducing overall cost. Large space availability means the device can store larger amounts of WB of L2P table information resulting in higher storage performance.
Posted in Automotive, eMMC, Flash, Memory, MIPI, Mobile SoC, ONFi, SPI, Storage, UFS, Uncategorized, Unipro
Arm TechCon 2017 took place at Santa Clara on 24-26th Oct, 2017. This year, Synopsys’ Arm® AMBA® protocol experts were on hand to demonstrate our verification automation solutions for Arm AMBA Coherent Interconnects. Synopsys Auto SoC Testbench generation solution enables easy and quick integration and configuration of hundreds of coherent and non-coherent AMBA ports and corresponding VIP instances. Our experts also introduced our AMBA AutoPerformance solution to generate AMBA(CHI/ACE/AXI) interconnect performance verification stimulus. The AutoPerformance solution, based on Arm traffic profile specification, enables user to define traffic profiles for measurement of performance metrics like throughput, latency etc., and the stimulus is driven by VIP for AMBA (CHI/ACE/AXI).
Posted in ACE, AMBA, Automotive, CCI400, CHI, Data Center, Interconnects, Methodology, Mobile SoC, NOC, Processor Subsystems, SystemVerilog, Test Suites, UVM
MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI-2) is widely used as a camera interface in the mobile industry. MIPI Alliance is constantly working towards providing a solution to cater the increasing demand for higher-bandwidth and high-definition video like 1080p, 4K, and 8K. The MIPI Working Group released CSI-2 v2.0 to target emerging imaging and vision applications. It has extended the usages of CSI-2 to IoT, wearable devices, drones, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), and automotive systems.
Posted in Automotive, C-PHY, Camera, CSI, D-PHY, Interface Subsystems, MIPI, Mobile SoC
USB has literally become universal and present in every device ranging from smart phones and personal computers, IoT and wearables, storage and networking, consumer electronics and gaming consoles, automotive and many other emerging verticals. The success of USB can be attributed to innovation with each new generation—the capability to transfer data as well as supply power for charging devices and ease-of-use with a variety of connectors and form factors.
Posted in Automotive, Data Center, Display, Flash, Mobile SoC, Storage, Type C, Uncategorized
The mobile industry is growing at a very fast pace with its never-ending hunger for data and bandwidth. We have witnessed the change from a dial-pad to touch-screens, from black and white display to QHD 4k display with millions of colors, and memory space from KB to GB, in a very short span of time. The biggest challenge is increasing bandwidth without compromising performance or adding any significant numbers in the power consumption column. The solution to this challenge is the LPDDR or Mobile DDR standard released by JEDEC. There have been several revisions to this standard, the latest being LPDDR4. LPDDR4 provides a data bandwidth of 4266 Mbps, which is almost double that of LPDDR3. It also provides a significant reduction in power consumption compared to LPDDR3. For further insights on LPDDR4 and its predecessors please refer to our previous blog “LPDDR4: What Makes it Faster and Reduces Power Consumption.”
Posted in DDR, LPDDR, Memory, Mobile SoC
In our previous blog, “Ever Wonder How USB Type-C Works”, one of the paramount features we discussed was the Type-C connector being used with third party peripherals in-addition to USB. The mode in which the Type-C cable assembly facilitates operation of “Alternate” protocols is called Alternate Mode. USB Type-C Alternate Mode specification allows MHL, DisplayPort, HDMI, and Thunderbolt over Type-C. Alternate Mode is an option made available to the USB Hosts; however, USB should be the preeminent interface to be exposed over Type-C assembly, justifying the tag ‘Alternate’.
Posted in Automotive, Display, DisplayPort, HDMI, MHL, Mobile SoC, Type C, USB
