Accelerating Data Center Development with Arm Total Design

In 2023, generative AI burst onto the scene like a bolt of lightning. Immediately, it illuminated the demand for more compute power and flexibility to drive more optimized solutions to process the massive amounts of data generated by billions of devices. This is one of the driving forces behind Arm Total Design, a leading group of industry leaders collaborating to accelerate and simplify the development of Arm Neoverse CSS-based systems. In just a few months, this has proven to be a fast-growing ecosystem of expertise innovating on Arm Neoverse to meet surging data center demands. 

With Arm Total Design, partners get preferential access to Arm Neoverse CSS, pre-integrated IP and EDA tools, design services, foundry support, and commercial software and firmware support. By working with this ecosystem, partners can leverage the expertise and resources of the industry to bring custom silicon solutions rapidly to market.

In February 2024, Arm announced nine new companies participating in Arm Total Design, which has now reached more than 20 active partners in key areas of expertise: 

Design Services

• ASICLAND, which specializes in designing and manufacturing ASICs across various industries.
• HCL, a global technology company offering IT services, consulting, and business solutions.

Complementary IP 

• Ceva, a leading provider of digital signal processing technology for various applications including wireless communications, audio processing, and computer vision.

Advanced Analytics 

• proteanTecs, a leading provider of advanced deep data analytics and on-chip monitoring solutions for semiconductor and electronics companies to improve product reliability, power and performance throughout their lifecycle.

Semiconductor companies

• Jaguar Micro, a leading technology company developing a new generation of DPUs and advanced silicon solutions for modern data centers.
• Novatek, a provider of display driver ICs and related solutions for flat panel displays used in smartphones, tablets, monitors, and televisions.
• RealTek, which supplies networking and multimedia ICs, for Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and audio applications.

Semiconductor foundries

• Samsung, the global conglomerate known for its wide range of products including smartphones, televisions, home appliances, semiconductors, and memory chips.

EDA

• Siemens EDA, a global company dedicated to helping companies engineer a smarter future faster. Siemens is committed to delivering the world’s most comprehensive portfolio of industry-proven, AI-driven electronic design automation (EDA) software as well as hardware and services. 

How Arm Neoverse CSS offers a new approach to innovation

Arm Neoverse CSS is a revolutionary shift in infrastructure solutions, designed to enhance power, performance, and area while accelerating time-to-market, reducing developer costs, and fostering innovation.

For our partners and customers in the semiconductor industry, the Arm Total Design offers several benefits, including: 

• More innovation: Arm Total Design enables more innovation by allowing partners to create customized and optimized solutions that meet their unique needs. By leveraging the Arm Neoverse platform and our ecosystem’s CSS-specific expertise, partners can add their own value and innovation to differentiate their products.
• Faster Time-to-Market: Arm Total Design also enables faster time-to-market by allowing partners to start their design with Arm Neoverse CSS, then leverage expert partners to complete the design, by replacing uncertainty with confidence and success in new custom silicon designs.
• More efficient investment: Arm Total Design enhances investment efficiency by multiplying the efficiency effect of Neoverse CSS, saving partners the effort of integrating a complex CPU system. This is expanded with complementary IP, more efficient design flows, and centers of excellence. The engineering hours saved translate into direct bottom-line savings or can be reinvested to further differentiate a design.

Our success is rotted in a vibrant, global supply chain enriched by partnerships with design leaders from innovation hubs in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and beyond, as well as collaborations with all three major foundries. This diverse network brings together cutting-edge silicon designs and the most advanced nodes with the Arm ecosystem to ensure custom silicon is available everywhere.

What is the role of Arm Total Design in Infrastructure Designs?

Arm Total Design also provides support and training for high-end infrastructure designs and ASIC design-services business growth. A notable example of this is Faraday Technology’s partnership with Arm and Intel that resulted in a 64-core SoC using Intel’s 18A technology. This SoC can be used across hyperscale data centers, network edge, and 5G deployments.

Moreover, this alliance is fostering a chiplet ecosystem, with initiatives like AMBA CHI chip-to-chip interconnect protocol. This collaboration aligns the industry on interfaces and system architectures for multi-die SoC designs. Socionext’s multi-core CPU chiplet, developed on TSMC 2nm and adopting Neoverse CSS technology, targes server CPUs, data center AI edge servers, and 5/6G infrastructure.

Smoothing the way to the future 

Arm Total Design is an innovative approach that enables Arm’s partners to develop customized and optimized solutions for a variety of applications and markets, promoting growth and scalability. Partners can provide more value to their customers and end-users, penetrate new markets, and reduce time-to-market and development costs.

Arm Total Design is not only a set of ecosystem partners providing IP, services and tools – it’s a new mindset that encourages collaboration, flexibility, and innovation on Arm across the chip design ecosystem in the age of AI.

Supporting Partners

ASICLAND

“Joining Arm Total Design gives us more opportunities to pursue our vision – being a value-up partner through constant innovation and providing the finest semiconductor solutions to a global market.”

–James Lee, CEO, ASICLAND

Ceva

“Arm Total Design means customers can pair Ceva’s market leading PentaG baseband platform with proven Neoverse CSS computing platforms – unlocking more performance and energy efficiency for 5G infrastructure, Non-Terrestrial Networks and other high performance communication applications.”

–Iri Trashanski, Chief Strategy Officer, Ceva

HCLTech

“As a valued partner within ARM’s Total Design ecosystem, HCLTech is dedicated to delivering turnkey semiconductor solutions crafted on the foundation of Arm Neoverse CSS technology. Together, we address the forefront of next-gen applications, providing clients with a collaborative edge in innovation and a pathway to sustainable success.”

–RaviKumar Chirugudu, Senior Vice President, ERS(Engineering R&D services), HCLTech

Novatek

“We are delighted to bring our extensive expertise in custom design to Arm Total Design. With the support of leading foundry processes and advanced packaging partners, as well as our proactive investment in chiplets and advanced processes coupled with software expertise, we are confident in our ability to rapidly provide mass production and ecosystem services to our customers in need of Arm Neoverse low-power and high-performance custom solutions. ”

–Steve Wang,Vice Chairman and President, Novatek 

ProteanTecs

“ProteanTecs’ deep data analytics solutions give the electronics industry the confidence to scale, while meeting all the requirements of mega-functionality, field reliability and power/ performance. Joining Arm Total Design expands our existing collaboration and brings our unique ML-driven chip telemetry to the Arm Neoverse ecosystem. Mutual customers can now accelerate their time to market, enhance their manufacturing process with data-driven insights and monitor the system health and performance during lifetime operation, boosting reliability and reducing power.”

–Uzi Baruch, Chief Strategy Officer (CSO), proteanTecs

Samsung

“Samsung is thrilled to build upon our long relationship with Arm by joining Arm Total Design. This will extend Arm Neoverse CSS customers’ benefit with Samsung’s latest technologies from FinFET to GAA, such as our SF4X and SF2 process nodes.” 

–Gibong Jeong, Executive Vice President and head of Foundry Business Development Team, Samsung Electronics

Siemens

“Siemens is dedicated to ensuring the best experience for the electronic design community by providing both industry-leading tools and impactful services.  Arm Total Design enables us to optimize our offerings for Arm Neoverse CSS platforms and expand our contribution to our customers’ technical and business success.” 

–Sam George, Vice President of Consulting and Learning Services for the Siemens EDA division of Siemens Digital Industries Software 

Realtek

“Realtek and Arm have a long history of utilizing Arm IP and it’s solutions, across a broad range of markets. We are excited to be a key partner in Taiwan for Arm Total Design. Arm Total Design is helping Realtek expand our business into the infrastructure market by building expertise on Neoverse CSS, targeted for data centers, AI, and networking use cases.”

–Edson Dong, Vice President, International Market and Sales Dept., Realtek