Site structure

Projects

Community centric hardware design projects are the core activity of the SoC Labs. We are keen to share information on projects much earlier than traditional academic sharing. Historically knowledge sharing has been at the end of the research activity, with published papers and results. We are keen to get collaborations started much earlier. So as well as write up of finished projects ("case studies"), ongoing projects under development ("projects") and even projects that are still being formulated ("request for collaboration") are listed. We want to encourage people to engage with the project teams, for example, adding a comment to a specific project page. The specific project pages have links to the 'technology' and 'design flow' stages used.

Organisations

The SoC Labs community is made up of academics from academic organisations around the world. 

As well as organisations who have people who have signed up as members of the SoC Labs community there are also 'Other Organisations' listed. These are organisations who are not directly involved with SoC Labs, but who have interests, technology or other items, such as Known Good Dies, associated with them. Other organisations and non-members are recommended to the SoC Labs community and site by members. If your organisation is listed in this way and would like to actively get involved with SoC Labs, let us know.
 

Technology

A SoC based hardware design requires the system to be constructed of various general purpose and specific IP components. The various subsystems of the SoC lead to a hierarchical structuring of the IP components. The baseline IP components come from the Arm IP ecosystem and are provided to the academic community under the Arm Academic Access programme. We expect many Community research SoC designs will be a combination Arm IP blocks, community centric hardware design IP blocks and specific IP blocks developed as part of the novel research. 

Interests

This area covers various topics that are not covered by Technolgy, Design Flows, Projects or timely News items. It does not yet have a clear hierarchical or linear structuring of the information that other areas have. The structure of this area may adapt to community needs over time.

Design Flows

A SoC based hardware design project follows a path of design steps. Hardware design often follows a decomposition of the design through a series of abstractions from the ultimate fabricated device where the designer defines the SoC system in abstract hardware description languages. This area of the site has a hierarchical structure of the abstract design stages and the design flows within each. As well as descriptions of the generic design flow steps there are also descriptions of specific flows using specific tools based on specific supplier's FPGA solutions or ASIC tape out routes. 

The main root of the design flows hierarchy has the four main design abstractions, Architectural, Behavioral, Logical and Physical. Below each are the generic design steps. Here the community can discuss ongoing work to improve each activity as well as any general comments on tool support either open source or linked to Arm or other 3rd party licensed tools.

There is also an area for example design flows. The open source community, Arm and other 3rd party are all looking to provide design support environments that simplify the SoC design task. We have provided a few example design flows that will be used on projects and encourage the community to share more examples here.

News

Unlike other areas of the site, News does not currently have a hierarchical structure, it is a simple time ordered list of articles, the most recent first.