2025 Outlook with Oliver Jones of Sondrel

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company. 

Sondrel was founded in 2002 after identifying a gap in the market for an international company specialising in customer-specific digital IC design. Sondrel’s services range from  turnkey ASIC “architecture through silicon supply” to team augmentation for customers needing less than full service. We are one of only a few companies capable of designing and supplying the higher-spec chips built on the most advanced semiconductor technologies.

Being headquartered in the UK, we are perfectly positioned to service companies around the globe via our global design centres and network offices. This also means that we can work for American customers without any geopolitical trade restrictions.

We offer an end-to-end, turnkey solution including the whole chip creation journey helping with the hard decisions required to create a complex ASIC. Many of our customers are systems house, in markets such as HPC, automotive, networking or vision systems but we also support fabless chip providers seeking to get new products to market. Our highly experienced teams of engineers draw on hundreds of successful projects to ensure that we bring added value to enhance a customer’s project because we know how to achieve the very best performance, power and area for a design.

What was the most exciting high point of 2024 for your company? 

We have refocused the company on our key differentiator which is meeting our customer design needs with exemplary care and attention at every stage of a chip project, from architectural specification through design to final shipping silicon. It is a complete, comprehensive, custom chip creation service that we only offer to a select number of companies who want a partnership that they can rely on. After all, modern chip projects cost millions so customers need to have complete trust that their partner will deliver a quality product to agreed timescales and budgets.

We have the skills to handle each project as our team of engineers have thousands of years of cumulative design skills from hundreds of successful projects at leading edge nodes right down to 3nm so customers can be confident that their project will be in safe hands.

And we are small enough to be able to focus and really care about each customer and the success of their project. This sets us apart from our competition.

What was the biggest challenge your company faced in 2024? 

Delisting from the Stock Market. The Board realised that the company would be more agile and better placed to respond quicker to changing market trends if it was not listed at this stage in our growth.

How is your company’s work addressing this biggest challenge? 

We had a terrific team in place that ensured that this was effected smoothly. We are now a private company with one large investor and numerous smaller investors. We are focused in growing our business one customer at a time, partnering to deliver on their success.

What do you think the biggest growth area for 2025 will be, and why?

Advanced semiconductor designs.  Electronics is the driving enabling force for innovation across so many areas:  High Performance Computing in the datacenter, Artificial Intelligence at the edge, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems for cars, communications connecting the datacenter and edge. Their common theme is ever more complex chip designs with billions of transistors and advanced manufacturing process nodes. Our focus is delivering quality results to our customers, whatever their end-markets or applications

How is your company’s work addressing this growth? 

Our specialty has always been chips at the leading edge of design technology and laying out millions and then billions of transistors as process technologies became smaller and smaller so we are perfectly positioned to provide the ultra-complex custom chips that customers need to create next generation products.

What conferences did you attend in 2024 and how was the traffic?

Sondrel was at multiple conferences across North America and EMEA in 2024, including multiple RISC-V conferences globally, AI and Edge events and partner events from TSMC, ARM, Samsung, Global Foundry and Tower-Jazz.  It’s exciting to see so many new semiconductor designs underway.

Will you attend conferences in 2025? Same or more?

Our primary focus is serving our customers but we will also be participating with selected industry events. Overall, we are planning to attend more conferences in 2025 but our focus is on quality of events, not quantity.  We do see face to face interactions as a great way to engage with potential customers as they can rapidly see how passionate we are about what we do and that we really care about customers.

How do customers engage with your company?

We have a technical sales team who are backed up with highly experienced engineers who invest the time at the start of a project to define it in much greater depth, I believe, than any of our rivals. We often begin with an Architectural Specification stage to ensure that both parties are aligned on the entire scope of the project and so that we can reduce unexpected hiccups. This stage also provides the roadmap for the whole project to ensure a holistic approach is maintained at all times to keep the project on schedule, in budget and meeting performance objectives.

Additional questions or final comments? 

We aren’t interested in coming in with low-ball bids which rely on ECOs that up the cost to customers.  Our focus is getting a full alignment with each customer upfront to help ensure we deliver exactly what they need.  Think of it as “measure twice, cut once.”  We think this is a key benefit to each of our customers.

Also Read:

Sondrel Redefines the AI Chip Design Process

Automotive Designs Have No Room for Error!

Sondrel’s Drive in the Automotive Industry