August 29, 2011 -- Faraday Technology Corp. has used MathWorks, Inc.'s Model-Based Design to accelerate the development of SOCs, including development of its NAND Flash Controller error correcting code (ECC) engine. MATLAB and Simulink products have helped Faraday accelerate development of more efficient designs by completing system-level simulations 200 times faster, increasing throughput performance by 15%, and cutting gate count by up to 57%.

Faraday adopted Model-Based Design to accelerate SIP (system-in-package) development, explore system-level design alternatives, and improve communication among engineers. This design approach has helped reduce gate count, and shorten the development cycle for memory controllers and other modules, and, as a result, differentiate itself through lower cost to its customers.

"Model-Based Design provided an efficient and cost-effective way to improve silicon intellectual property development by enabling us to rapidly identify the best design configurations and get products to market faster," said Ken Chen, ESL Methodology Manager at Faraday. "The Simulink environment is ideal for integrating, simulating, and exploring design architectures. The simulations are up to 200 times faster than RTL simulations, and Simulink models can be easily converted to HDL code for FPGA prototyping."

Faraday engineers used MATLAB, Simulink, and Stateflow to model and simulate their system-level designs, and used Simulink Coder and Simulink HDL Coder to automatically generate code from their models. This workflow enabled Faraday engineers shorten the design process as they moved from architecture design to hardware and software implementation. Faraday has used Model-Based Design for DDR and flash controller projects and delivered the SIP designs on schedule. The engineering team is now focused on further accelerating development by reusing and adapting their existing models on new projects.