There is growing interest within the SoC Labs community for an Arm A-Class SoC that can support a full operating system, undertake more complex compute tasks and enable more complicated software directed research. The Cortex-A53 is Arm's most widely deployed 64-bit Armv8-A processor and can provide these capabilities with power efficiency. 

The Synopsys HAPS® System adds additional capabilities to the FPGA-based prototyping environments SoC Labs can use to support projects. The HAPS® system provides a greater amount of logic resources supporting development of larger SoC designs. It can be used to support multiple projects simultaneously. It is used by many semiconductor companies, including arm for their CPU verification. This collaboration project will use the HAPS® system in SoC Labs projects and share with the community experience in utilising such systems.

This collaboration project is aimed at providing specific tailored activities to the local geography in Canada by developing local actions that will help stimulate academics and their institutions and the broader semiconductor industry supporters to create new and exciting SoC design projects. 

It may include holding specific local physical meetups where people can exchange design ideas.

It may include utilising locally provided routes to fabrication.

It may include sharing hard to locate test capability across academic institutions.

On-chip SRAM in ASICs can use a significant area, which equates to a significant cost. One solution is to make the memory off-chip. This project explores the use of Arm IP to create an SRAM chiplet design. The benefit  is that standard memory chiplets can be fabricated at lower cost and used across multiple projects, miminising silicon area to the unique project needs.