IBM Research in chip development pact with EU's Daimond consortium

IBM Research yesterday announced its collaboration with industry leaders and universities in the European Union to improve the productivity and reliability of semiconductor and electronic systems design. By providing a systematic methodology and an integrated environment for the diagnosis and correction of errors, the EU-funded Diamond consortium expects to slash design time and enable significant savings per chip.

The Diamond consortiumm, which launched a three-year project this month, include IBM Research at Haifa in Israel; Ericsson, Sweden; Tallinna Tehnikaulikool, Estonia; Linkopings Universitet, Sweden; Universitat Bremen, Germany; Technische Universitat Graz, Austria; TransEDA Systems, Hungary; Testonica Lab, Estonia.

"Designing a microelectronic chip is very expensive and the design costs are the greatest threat to continuation of the semiconductor industry's phenomenal growth," noted Dr. Jaan Raik, senior researcher at Tallinna Tehnikaulikool and coordinator of the Diamond project. "The increasing gap between the complexity of new systems and the productivity of system design methods can only be mitigated by developing new and more competent design methods and tools."

The new integrated approach will localise and correct bugs on all abstraction levels, from specification through implementation down to the silicon layout. Handling this full chain of levels will allow the solution to take advantage of hierarchical diagnosis and correction capabilities incorporating a wide range of error sources.

"Correctness, already one of the major showstoppers for design, is becoming ever harder to attain," explained Cindy Eisner, senior technical staff member at IBM Research – Haifa and partner in the Diamond consortium. "Better debugging techniques must be a major focus in research and development if we want to keep increasing the scale of electronics design."

Today, approximately 70 per cent of design efforts are dedicated to verification and debugging. Two thirds of this is dedicated to discovering and localising the source of the fault and then correcting it.