Cadence Design Systems, Inc.

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In today's fiercely competitive market for high-end communications system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs, chipmakers not only must get to market first but must also get there with superior silicon.

Cadence Engineering Services has wide-ranging experience in engineering silicon for the challenges of high-end communications semiconductor designs, comprising hundreds of successful tape-outs for LAN, MAN, WAN, SAN, and WLAN applications.

We leverage our expertise in floorplanning and the use of Cadence tools—such as the Silicon Ensemble®-PKS physical implementation system, First Encounter® silicon virtual prototyping, and SignalStorm® NDC delay calculator—to accurately solve the design challenges inherent with complex communications SoCs. These include electrical design requirements such as chip/package/board pin assignment, flip-chip redistribution, clock architecture and distribution, modeling of the complete signal transmission as well as signal integrity impact to functional correctness and timing, power distribution, and on-chip/off-chip noise management.

The Cadence silicon-proven SoC design flow applies a consistent, hierarchical design and verification methodology—from architectural design through tape-out—to accelerate the design schedule and improve the quality of results. We make sure that design hierarchy is maintained throughout the design flow to allow concurrent engineering as well as ease of verification and bug fixes at any point in the design process.

In addition, Cadence leverages its portfolio of select silicon IP that is optimized, proven, and characterized for PCI Express, Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) Common Electrical I/O (CEI), XAUI, Ethernet, InfiniBand, SONET/SDH, OIF SxI-5, and Fibre Channel industry standards. Using this proven IP in your design accelerates silicon implementation, mitigates risk, and ensures high-quality silicon.

Examples of world-class silicon engineering that Cadence has provided to customers for successful tape-out of high-end communications SoCs include 40-Gbps framer and pointer processors, 160-Gbps switching fabric, OC-48 network traffic manager and SAR, and SAN line card processors.