LONDON — ARM plc is making available from its website what it says is the industry's most comprehensive IP platform for TSMC's 40-nm G foundry process.

ARM (Cambridge, England) says the platform enables higher levels of innovation while maintaining power budgets in consumer devices including disc drives, set-top boxes, mobile computing devices, networking applications, high-definition TVs and graphic processors.

The platform was designed to enable a great degree of flexibility through the multi channel logic libraries aimed at addressing the leakage challenges of submicron designs. Because the multichannel length libraries are footprint compatible, this allows cell swapping within standard design flows and power savings by replacing the HVt, RVt or LVt implant layers with long channel length devices.

The platform also includes embedded memory compilers and interface IP to meet a wide range of performance, power and area requirements. The company added the 40-nm Interface IP provides SoCs designers with a comprehensive set of both general and specific I/Os and DDR interface macros.

Simon Segars, executive vice president and general manager, physical IP division at ARM, said the company was able to come up with this platform since it can develop processor IP and physical IP in parallel so they fully complement each other and reduce the overall design cycle.

"We further enhance our technology through early engagement with the leading foundries and EDA companies to ensure a robust support infrastructure exists, providing the designer with a low risk, silicon proven, cost efficient design strategy. Through our strategic relationship with TSMC we can optimize the physical design with the manufacturing process technology to provide optimal results."

ARM has been working with Synopsys and the platform has been has validated with the latter's Lynx Design System.

"Pre-testing ARM IP with Lynx's Foundry-Ready System provides a low-risk path to a proven, manufacturing-ready SoC solution at 40-nm," said John Chilton, Synopsys' senior vice president of marketing and strategic development, in a statement.

The 40-nm G libraries are available at on ARM's website.