Racyics tape-outs 22FDX Reference SoC Test Chip for Display Applications
May 23, 2021 −
Racyics tape-outs 22FDX reference SoC testchip in GLOBALFOUNDRIES 22FDX technology including embedded MRAM, an ARM® Cortex M4F MCU and a ThinkSiliconNema® Pico GPU. It is implemented by Racyics GmbH and uses the Racyics ABX adaptive body bias IP platform. Tape-out was achieved today on the 23.05.2021.
Motivation
Inside Racyics, we have developed a series of leading-edge technologies and offer a wide range of custom IP. Together with GLOBALFOUNDRIES and ThinkSilicon we have created a testchip to demonstrate the capabilities of 22FDX embedded MRAM in combination with several of our IPs in one SoC to show the unique advantages of the Racyics ABX platform for low power devices. This combination is the perfect blueprint for upcoming 22FDX IoT/automotive/Industrie 4.0 customer projects.
General Design
The 22FDX Reference SoC is a testchip based on Racyics’ ABX Platform for GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 22FDX technology. The size of the die is 3586.0µm 3936.0µm – an area of 14.11 mm² – with 144 pads. It consists of 991k Flip-Flop-equivalents or 654k instances. The RBB domain contains one ARM processor and an IoT GPU plus Display Controller, two Ethernet MACs, standard peripherals like I2C, SPI, UART, etc. and 3.5 MBytes of SRAM (Racyics single-rail 0.55V, fully RBB biased based on Racyics R188 bit cell). The ZBB domain contains GPIO PADs, two buck converters, PMU (all Racyics IP) and 512kByte MRAM.
ABX Regulation in Detail
The 22FDX Reference SoC has two on-chip buck converters, which are used to generate voltages for the two domains from an external 1.8V. A leakage optimized RBB regulation scheme is implemented, which enables low leakage even under high temperatures (up to 150°C). On top of ABB, the Hellboy SoC includes a Dynamic Voltage & Frequency Scaling (DVFS) feature with two operational modes, High Performance Mode (200 MHz @ 0.80V) and Low Power Mode (50 MHz @ 0.55V). All integrated power management features are controlled by an power management unit designed by Racyics.