BENGALURU, India — ARM has set up a VLSI test lab at its design center here to analyze intellectual-property libraries and ARM physical IP, so as to correlate design to silicon behavior. Such activity has increasingly become a customer requirement prior to system-on-chip tapeout as technology has grown more complex and mask costs have risen.
The VLSI test lab will focus on silicon validation of physical IP including memory compilers, standard cells, power-management kits, and general-purpose and specialty I/Os designed with cutting-edge technologies that include 65- and 45-nanometer processes.
The lab will enable the design center here to provide a complete set of design services to the company's partners globally. The addition expands capacity and accelerates development for members of the ARM Partners program, the company said. Test chips developed by ARM will go through final validation at the new lab, enabling ARM Partners utilizing production-ready IP libraries to reduce time-to-market and increase the probability of first-pass silicon success.
"The choice of India as the location of the second VLSI test lab for ARM is yet another example of India's significance in our global operations," said ARM CEO Warren East. "Combining expertise in IP and test chip design and test engineers in the same geographic location will reduce overall silicon validation cycle time, enabling us to turn around silicon data to partners quickly, resulting in an accelerated release schedule for products designed with ARM physical IP."
India is already home to the largest number of ARM-approved design centers. The number stands at eight: HCL Technologies, IBM, KPIT Cummins, Mindtree Consulting, Sasken Communication, Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Elxsi and Wipro Technologies. ARM is talking to other companies in an effort to expand the list further.
The Bengaluru site, where ARM employs about 350 engineers and has the capacity to add an equal number, concentrates on physical-IP development. More than 7,000 Indian engineers—2,000 of them in this city—boast ARM-based experience.
