Situation

A customer was in need of significant resource support to add bandwidth to their new product development cycle and knew Synapse Design to be a company that can meet difficult challenges like this. We became aware of the availability of very talented senior engineers with the required expertise. However, they were located in a city in the US where we did not have a design center presence at that time.

Building a `ground-up` design center and deploying a sizable team in 1 month`s time is a very significant challenge

Tasks

• Find technical anchor to lead our team
• Locate, renovate and occupy suitable office space
• Ramp team to 20 people in 4 weeks
• Immediately establish reputation of our team as highly functional and self sufficient

Actions Taken

By leveraging our extensive network of industry contacts a suitable leader with considerable expertise and reputation in the required domain space was located and attracted to work for Synapse Design within the first week. Synapse Design CEO and CTO flew into town and embarked on an aggressive and targeted mass interview process, building on each new hire to identify and attract subsequent employees. Simultaneously, suitable local office space was identified, renovated, and occupied. In the initial weeks, the team worked and was managed out of local hotel conference rooms.

Result

Every resource, substantial creativity, and an attitude of "getting it done" resulted in a successful ramp of the team to 20 people in the first 4 weeks. Before taking up full time residence in our permanent office space, multiple, significant contributions had been made to the customer by our experienced team. The full team remained engaged for over three years and a portion of the team remains deployed today. Retention of this original team has been high and our reputation in the industry and this space is now second to none.

Situation

A customer wanted to implement a new verification methodology based on SystemVerilog and UVM. This is a difficult skillset to find in the industry, but given our reputation as a leader in design services in new verification methodologies and techniques, they came to us for assistance. They also wanted to immediately deploy this new methodology to verify a very complex design.

Developing a new SystemVerilog/UVM methodology and immediately applying it on a new, complex design is very challenging, both in terms of the expertise required and the ability to quickly deploy experienced engineers.

Tasks

• Understand the customer`s unique requirements, and from that build a SystemVerilog/UVM verification framework
• Build a team to deploy on the first usage of this new methodology on a critical production design
• Ramp team to 20 engineers across 2 primary locations

Actions Taken

We assigned our top verification methodology expert to develop the SystemVerilog/UVM framework, and followed up with our senior engineers to develop the associated verification environment, followed by additional engineers to develop the full set of testbenches, and to deploy and debug the testbenches.

The team of engineers was assembled from both our existing staff, and also with others that were brought in from our network for their specialized skills, all being directed and mentored by our verification lead and senior engineers.

Result

The methodology and environment are in place, and the verification of the production design is ongoing, but well on its way to completion. Even though this is the first usage of this methodology, and it is being immediately used on a new architecture for the design, the team is operating at a high level of efficiency. They are quickly developing testbenches with high functional coverage, that are identifying chip design problems. They are working closely with the design team to close on the identified issues.

Based on our success on this project, we are currently in discussions to broaden our role by supplying consulting services into other areas for this same customer.

Situation

A long-term customer came to us asking that we assist them in migrating a design from one technology node to another, while also making significant functional enhancements to the design. This required skills in the full spectrum from RTL design up through the release to the silicon foundry.

We were also asked to co-locate part of the team with our customer in Europe, and to add an off-shore component in India for cost and other considerations.

We faced the challenges of building a full RTL-to-GDSII team in multiple geographies, deploying a broad set of skillsets, plus the ability to manage a team spread around the globe.

Tasks

• Find technical anchors in design, verification, synthesis, STA, DFT and physical design to build our team around
• Ramp team to 30 people in less than 4 weeks
• Identify engineers that can be deployed into the multiple geographies, and work with the local government officials to comply with all labor requirements
• Identify a senior member of Synapse Design to have overall project management responsibility for our team

Actions Taken

We quickly assembled a team consisting of engineers with the various skillsets, drawing on available resources from several locations in Europe, India and the US. The logistical requirements of getting work permits in Europe, and also temporary housing there were resolved. Some members of the team began training efforts within two weeks so they could train the additional team members as they joined. We assigned a senior manager to oversee the effort, traveling to multiple locations to assemble the team, establish a close working relationship with the customer`s project management team, and to establish a feeling of teamwork among the assigned engineers.

Result

We met all the customer`s requirements on a very tight schedule, even with at least one major design change in mid-project. The design was a very complex SoC, with many I/O interfaces, embedded processors and other diverse IP blocks, plus low power design requirements. The chip has been fabricated, is working to spec, and is now in production release--the very definition of a successful result.

Situation

As is often the case, late-stage design changes offer significant challenges to the physical implementation team, as the design is already highly optimized to meet the objectives of reduced die size, high performance and low power. We were asked to implement a number of changes to fix large negative slack paths in a design that was nearing tapeout.

Tasks

• Accept a new timing constraints file for an already placed design
• Find a technical solution that only impacted the negative slack paths
• Implement this solution in less than the 2 weeks left before tapeout

Actions Taken

A novel approach was developed, tested and implemented, which in the end met all the requirements, along with the difficult time constraint.

Result

The Synapse Design engineer was able to pull off what even our customer didn`t think was possible. As such, he was awarded with a prestigious internal award to show the client`s great appreciation for the hard work and intelligence. Synapse Design saved the client several weeks of delay and uncertainty at a very critical stage as the design neared tapeout.