Below you will find information on community projects, the specific project pages have links to the 'technology' and 'design flow' stages used and ways you can comment on or join a project.

Projects are key to community hardware design

As a community hardware design activity we form our collaborations around shared design actions making Projects a core of the SoC Labs community. Projects help us share and reuse hardware and software developments around core Arm IP to help us in our research goals.

A project, takes technology and uses a design flow to make a SoC.

A project has a timeframe and uses the two other significant aspects of a SoC development, the selection of technology or IP blocks that make up the SoC and the design flow that is followed from specification through to final instantiation of a system. Any System On Chip usually involves the use of pre-existing IP blocks. A project team can select IP from the technology section of the site during the first stage of a design flow, Architectural Design. Later stages in the design flow support the creation of the novel aspects of the SoC design.

Projects have a type, either active, complete (case study) or being formulated (request for collaboration)

Sharing information on projects much earlier than traditional academic collaboration is encouraged. Historically knowledge sharing has been at the end of the research activity, with published papers and results. As well as write up of finished projects ("case study"), ongoing projects under development ("projects") there are projects that are still being formulated ("request for collaboration") listed. We want to encourage people to engage with the project teams, for example, adding a comment to a specific project page or joining a project.

Latest Reference Design Projects

Reference Design
Active Project
nanoSoC + Fast kNN accelerator

nanoSoC
A simple, low cost, entry level microcontroller SoC extendable for custom accelerators or simple signal processing, ideal for PhD or other students.
Reference Design
Active Project
d.wf @ soclabs

nanosoc re-usable MCU platform
A small SoC development framework to support research demonstrator designs

Latest Collaborative Projects

Collaborative
Active Project

DMA 350 integration with nanoSoC

The integration of the DMA350 into the nanosoc re-usable SoC architecture will improve the transfer bandwidth on DMA channels within the SoC.  This project integrates the DMA 350 into nanosoc, validates the integration and functionality of the DMA 350, and compares the performance of the DMA 350 to the PL230, that was the initial DMA controller integrated into nanosoc.

Collaborative
Active Project

System Verification of NanoSoC

Performing system-level verification on a System-on-Chip (SoC) design is crucial for ensuring the correct function and overall performance of the entire system, rather than individual components. With NanoSoC, there are multiple options for performing system-level verification.

Collaborative
Case Study
dwf @soton.ac.uk

Building system-optimised AMBA interconnect
Example case-study of using the Arm CMSDK AMBA-AHB Bus-Matrix tools to build system-optimised interconnect.
Collaborative
Active Project

SHA-2 Accelerator Engine

Motivation

At SoC Labs, we have need of an accelerator to test our SoC infrastructure and confirmation of our accelerator wrapper design to get size and performance information as well as to try and get ahead and uncover potential problems researchers may experience trying to put their IP into the reference SoC.

 

Specification

The preliminary design has been broken into two main blocks:

Latest Competition Projects

Competition 2025
Competition: Hardware Implementation
Project Milestone Overview example

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Competition 2023
Competition: Collaboration/Education

Wireless smart machine box for industrial IoT fault detection and notification
Frequent collisions and vibrations mean machinery components in modern factories suffer from wear and aging. Bearings and gears play a significant role. This work developed a wireless smart machine box for industrial IoT fault detection and notification. The Arm based SoC design performs feature extraction from the sensed vibration data and AXI based Direct Memory Access (DMA) to support local Random Forest machine learning. Data is also transmitted via a wireless sensor network to cloud based actions.
Competition 2023
Competition: Hardware Implementation

A 28nm Motion-Control SoC with ARM Cortex-M3 MCU for Autonomous Mobile Robots

Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) have been proven useful for smart factories and have the potential to revolutionize critical missions, such as disaster rescue. AMRs can perceive the environment, plan for assigned tasks, and act on the plan. Motion control is critical to the robot's action, which is accomplished through trajectory optimization to refine the robot's states using a physics model. However, the high computational complexity of trajectory optimization poses significant challenges for AMRs with limited power and computing resources.

Competition 2023
Competition: Hardware Implementation
Monitoring and enhancing plant growth in space ecosystems

This project focuses on developing a plant growth monitoring system for space exploration missions using the ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller core. The projects aim to develop a SOC based on ARM M0 core for interactive plant monitoring by interfacing AHB lite, GPIO, timers, and communication protocols such as UART, I2C, SPI, and co-processors.  This project also proposes two co-processors for interactive plant monitoring and control. One AI co-processor for classification and prediction of plant and environmental data.

Latest Completed Project Milestones

Project Name Target Date Completed Date Description
Project Milestone Overview example Simulation
Project Milestone Overview example Clock Tree Synthesis
Project Milestone Overview example Generate RTL
Project Milestone Overview example Synthesis
Project Milestone Overview example Architectural Design
Project Milestone Overview example Technology Selection
Project Milestone Overview example Specifying a SoC

Test

BlackBear : A reconfigurable AI inference accelerator for large image applications Milestone #6
  • Verifying communication types without data exchange in Data Link Layer Protocol
    • PE-Tile: Implement the Network Interface Controller (NIC), the Direct Memory Access (DMA), and a debug module acting as a PCU to finish communication procedures.
    • Control subsystem: Implement a baremetal runtime running on the processor in the Processing System of our FPGA board.
    • Verify hardware correctness with RTL simulation.
    • Prototype the hardware design on our FPGA board and co-simulate with the runtime to monitor the process of each target communication types.
  • Verifying communication types with data exchange in Data Link Layer Protocol
    • PE-Tile
      • Enhance the Network Interface Controller (PE-NIC), the Direct Memory Access (DMA), and the debug module acting as a PCU.
      • Implement the Shared Memory Controller (SMC) to handle memory access requests from PE-Tile system bus and data copy operations through NoC interconnects.
    • Control subsystem: Implement a baremetal runtime running on the processor in the Processing System of our FPGA board.
    • Global cache memory: Implement the Cache Network Interface Controller (Cache-NIC) and cache controller to accept requests from components attached on NoCs and return corresponding response.
    • The RTL verification and FPGA prototyping will be finished in the next milestone.
Enhancing HLS4ML: Accelerating DNNs on FPGA and ASIC for Scientific Computing 2. Developing ASIC flow (65 nm GP) and FPGA flows
Enhancing HLS4ML: Accelerating DNNs on FPGA and ASIC for Scientific Computing 5. Software (bundle) + RTL flow tested on FPGA for an entire CNN

Latest Project Updates