American Megatrends International announced an accelerated Shift Left initiative for Arm Total Design through its collaboration with Arm and Synopsys. This effort introduces an enhancement to the Synopsys ASIC design flow that brings verification of AMI OnSil silicon firmware and Aptio V UEFI firmware from American Megatrends International forward from the silicon prototype phase to the RTL validation stage, well before initial tape-out. By shifting these critical steps left, the initiative complements the Arm Total Design chiplet strategy, which significantly reduces custom silicon design costs, shortens product time-to-market by months, and mitigates capital and complexity-related risks.
Supporting this initiative is the software bring-up of Aptio V UEFI firmware and the AMI OnSil Arm firmware stack on a pre-silicon emulation of Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS) and Synopsys IP integrated design on Synopsys ZeBu emulators. This methodology takes firmware validation several steps beyond that of verification with the Arm Fixed Virtual Platform (FVP), adding runtime silicon components, such as Synopsys high-speed IO, security, and Silicon Lifecycle Management (SLM) IP. Design teams can significantly reduce deployment time for the silicon and platforms through this validation of real-world workloads and verification of SBSA compliance pre-silicon.
The resulting prototypes are at a much lower risk of firmware driven defects, reducing risk and time to market.
