The Finnish SoC Hub consortium, which is a collaboration between Tampere University, the government of Finland, and Nokia, has taped out its first System on Chip (SoC) design.
The new Ballast chip is the first in a series of three chips. The chip will be manufactured by TSMC using its 22nm Ultra Low Leakage process, which is especially well suited for IoT and Edge devices. Ballast contains several different RISC-V CPU cores, a Digital Signal Processor, an AI accelerator, rich sensor-like interfaces and an extension interface to FPGA. A full software stack – including drivers, software development tools and chip debugging support – has also been implemented. The chip supports both real-time operating systems and Linux simultaneously.
“The SoC has been developed using the same methods that are used in industrial production, such as design for testability, extensive verification and focusing on system-level integration instead of single modules,” says Ari Kulmala, professor of practice in SoC design at Tampere University.
According to Kulmala, the chip can also be tested by external stakeholders as it includes a development kit, and it can be integrated into a wide range of other systems.
