One Thousand Production Licenses Means Silicon Creations PLL IP is Everywhere

If you sell sneakers, 1,000 pair is called a humble beginning. On the other hand, selling 1,000 licenses for specialized analog IP is a home run.  Silicon Creations celebrated a home run for a critical piece of analog IP that finds its way into a diverse array of applications. Succeeding in so many markets is noteworthy, and I want to share some significant facts around this achievement. You will see how 1,000 production licenses mean Silicon Creations PLL IP is everywhere.

About Silicon Creations

Silicon Creations is a self-funded, leading silicon IP provider. The company provides high-quality IP for precision and general-purpose timing (PLLs), oscillators, low-power, high-performance multi-protocol and targeted SerDes, and high-speed differential I/Os.  The IP finds diverse applications including smart phones, wearables, consumer devices, processors, network devices, automotive, IoT, and medical devices. As you can see, the company provides a lot of IP to multiple markets.

The just-announced milestone centers on its Fractional-N PLL IP. This IP delivers a multi-function, general-purpose frequency synthesizer. Unlike an integer-N PLL, the output frequency of a fractional-N PLL is not limited to integer multiples of the reference frequency. This significantly expands the scope of where the IP can be used. The complexity of the circuit also significantly increases, making it challenging to deliver reliable performance across all applications.

Silicon Creations has tackled this problem to deliver ultra-wide input and output ranges along with excellent jitter performance, modest area, and application-appropriate power. The result is a PLL that can be configured for almost any clocking application in complex SoC environments.

About the Achievement

In the press announcement, Silicon Creation’s principal and co-founder, Randy Caplan expanded on this achievement. He explained the company’s Fractional SoC PLLs have been deployed on more than 6 million wafers, translating to billions of chips in the market today.

Those are some very impressive numbers. Randy went on to highlight that the IP is available in a wide range of process nodes, from 2nm to 180nm. This is a testament to the robustness and adaptability of the technology, as it continues to meet the demands of the most advanced applications.

The Silicon Creations Fractional-N PLL IP is successfully deployed in a wide range of application areas, including:

• High-performance digital clocking
• PHY reference clock generation (e.g., DDR, PCIe, Ethernet, USB)
• Fast frequency hopping
• Spread-spectrum modulation
• Micro-degree resolution phase stepping

Thanks to its broad feature set, robustness, and reliability, the IP finds application in many markets, including AI, automotive, consumer electronics, IoT, and high-performance computing (HPC).

Customer Testimonials

Key members of Silicon Creation’s customer base also weighed in with their perspectives.  Kiran Burli, vice president of Technology Management, Solutions Engineering, Arm, commented, “Arm has successfully utilized Silicon Creations’ Fractional-N PLL to clock our prototype chips across leading edge process nodes for more than a decade. Our collaboration with Silicon Creations ensures optimized performance of the Arm compute platform across a wide range of markets and use cases.”

Shakeel Peera, vice president of marketing and strategy for Microchip’s FPGA business unit, commented, “Silicon Creations’ PLL technology is used throughout the PolarFire® FPGA family, including our RT line for space and high-reliability applications. The flexibility and performance of these PLLs support a wide range of use cases, allowing our customers to tailor their designs to meet specific demands across various applications.” Peera added, “We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Silicon Creations as we advance FPGA technology.”

To Learn More

You can read the full text of the press release from Silicon Creations here and listen to Randy Caplan explain the unique business model of Silicon Creations on the Semiconductor Insiders podcast here.  The full library of IP available from Silicon Creations can be found here. And that’s how Silicon Creations PLL IP is everywhere.

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