Siemens Digital Industries Software Integrated circuit design for new mobility Executive summary The success of autonomous vehicles hinges on the ability of a system of advanced sensors and powerful chips to perceive and process an immense amount of data in real-time. These chips will require never-before-seen architectures to meet the power, performance and area required for auto- mated driving, while surviving the harsh environmental conditions inside a vehicle. As automotive startups, established OEMs and systems companies vie to create these advanced systems, they will need a portfolio of advanced design automation and lifecycle management tools. Among the requirements of such tools in the years ahead – accelerating the creation of bespoke designs; enabling work across previously disparate technical disciplines; and providing access, via APIs and ongoing integration, to open platforms and technology-based ecosystems. Andrew Macleod Director of automotive marketing for the Mentor portfolio Siemens Digital Industries Software siemens.com/plm White paper | Integrated circuit design for new mobility New mobility demands new technology New mobility refers to a group of technologies that are value of electric and autonomous vehicles is increas- disrupting traditional means of moving humans and ingly found in the electronics, and not the mechanical goods from one place to another. Today, this includes aspects of the vehicle. In the new age of mobility, com- ride-sharing services, city-wide bike sharing programs, panies that are able to own and optimize the design of electric scooters and of course, connected, autonomous the critical electronics will capture more of the profit and electric vehicles. The latter have garnered innumer- available. This fact is bringing traditional automotive able hours of public, corporate and media attention due manufacturers into the electronics business, and simul- to the large-scale industry and societal changes they taneously attracting tech companies like Google and will cause. Siemens is perhaps unique in the world as a Facebook into the automotive industry. chip-to-city supplier to nearly all of this era’s current Consider the electronic content of an autonomous and would-be transportation providers – carmakers and vehicle. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) tier 1 suppliers, tech companies, mobility service provid- defines six levels of sophistication for autonomous ers and cities. vehicles, from zero to five. A level five autonomous Connected, electric and autonomous vehicles will alter vehicle will use a network of fifty or more advanced how cars are evaluated and used. In particular, the sensors to perceive the driving environment. This New mobility technologies such as autonomous cars and ride-sharing will disrupt our usual methods of transportation. Siemens Digital Industries Software 2 White paper | Integrated circuit design for new mobility network will link LiDAR, radar, camera and other sen- that meeting these requirements will require new sili- sors to detect key features of the vehicle’s environment con and system architectures, developed around artifi- such as road lines, traffic signs and signals, other vehi- cial intelligence, machine learning and information cles and pedestrians. Next, a set of integrated circuits processing. (IC) will process the gigabits of sensor data being gath- Developing bespoke SoCs to meet these exacting ered every second, process it and decide on a response. requirements is one of the most difficult, and critical This architecture will converge, with larger and more challenges that autonomous vehicle programs must powerful domain controller systems-on-chips (SoCs) overcome to achieve commercial success. The ability of connected to a centralized processing unit, all imple- these chips to navigate a vehicle safely and reliably menting artificial intelligence. To date, many autono- through an environment will be a key differentiator in mous vehicle programs have used CPUs and GPUs, the autonomous vehicle market. The safest and most designed for data center or personal computing applica- reliable system will garner the greatest public trust, and tions, as these domain controllers and central proces- thus the most favor in the marketplace. Advanced IC sors. These solutions worked well for early testing and design and verification solutions can help companies development tasks, but are not equipped to meet the realize their SoC designs, verify them, maximize their power, performance and area requirements of a true post-manufacturing yield and ensure their reliability autonomous vehicle SoC. Chip designers are discovering over long lifetimes. Chip-to-city implications as transportation evolves Today, car companies and Tomorrow, car companies and This requires technical To become global leaders their suppliers focus on suppliers will expand their solutions spanning in the future of mobility, building and selling cars. focus to mobility services, semiconductors to cities, car companies and their deploying and managing including electric, connected suppliers need a partner who vehicle fleets to meet the and autonomous design, offers this unique spectrum needs of consumers and cities. simulation, manufacturing of chip-to-city solutions. and fleet management. Siemens Digital Industries Software 3 White paper | Integrated circuit design for new mobility Accelerating automotive IC design cycles To meet the high-performance and low-power require- Using HLS to design at a higher level of abstraction can ments of autonomous vehicles, SoC designers will need reduce design times to a few months, and requires half to create bespoke silicon architectures optimized for as much code as a traditional RTL flow. Late functional artificial intelligence algorithms. Using traditional changes, new features, or even a migration between design methodologies will take far too long, as the technology nodes or from FPGA to ASIC can be incorpo- complexity of designs increases and verification time rated without impacting the design schedule. HLS also rises. To lower the investment in time and manpower, enables the design team to explore hundreds of design many companies are looking for a proven solution that variants to optimize the power, performance and area can increase their productivity and design quality, while of the chip. Design space exploration results in higher accelerating their time-to-market. This explains the quality designs compared to hand-coded RTL. increasing interest in high-level synthesis (HLS). Incorporating emulation into this flow enables the HLS takes high-level descriptions of the design function- design team to further accelerate design. The RTL gen- ality in SystemC or C++ and synthesizes them into RTL. erated from HLS can be instantiated in an emulator, Designing at a higher level of abstraction accelerates providing the software team a platform to test their the completion of initial designs by separating the software before any chip hardware is available. specification of the chip functionality from the imple- Meanwhile, synthesized sensor and mechatronic system mentation (figure 1). Designers must only describe data can be integrated to create a virtual environment what the chip needs to do, without delving into how it that provides realistic feedback to help optimize hard- accomplishes such functionality. Then, the HLS tool ware and software designs. automatically generates RTL to implement the described functionality. Algorithm High level synthesis R&D productitivty RTL Logic synthesis Gate Rising levels of abstraction Place and route Transistor Figure 1: HLS rises the design abstraction level to improve design productivity. Siemens Digital Industries Software 4 White paper | Integrated circuit design for new mobility Finally, advanced HLS solutions can conduct robust verification of the designs to remove bugs and errors Stimulus before the designers commit to RTL (figure 2). HLS generation Functional Design verification capabilities include automatic formal checks coverage checking of the C++ or SystemC code, simulation based C-to-RTL verification and formal equivalence verification to find HLS C++ source bugs and errors before synthesizing to RTL. Code coverage Established automotive manufacturers, startups and chip companies alike will need to develop brand new silicon architectures optimized for neural computing UCDB and computer vision to make autonomous vehicles possible. Existing design methodologies cannot scale to C-RTL formal HLS meet this demand. SoC designs for autonomous vehi- equivalence cles are too complex to design efficiently by hand-cod- ing RTL. Additionally, verification times are escalating out of control, making it necessary to verify designs as early as possible. HLS can deliver higher quality SoC UVM designs faster and more efficiently than hand-coded RTL. New HLS solutions further enhance this advantage RTL with automatic C-to-RTL verification. In sum, HLS can provide productivity gains up to 10X, and help designs get to market four times as fast. Figure 2: Advanced HLS flows HLS can perform C-to-RTL verification to remove bugs and errors before committing to RTL. Siemens Digital Industries Software 5 White paper | Integrated circuit design for new mobility Functional safety, verification and design for safety Despite the numerous challenges involved in designing Systematic faults are those that prevent an integrated SoCs for AVs, the most substantial obstacle to the suc- circuit from operating correctly according