The Jasper part of Cadence announced jointly with Sonics a relationship whereby Sonics uses JasperGold Apps as part of their verification. I talked to Drew Wingard, the CTO, about how they use it.
One way is during the day when their design engineers use Jasper as part of their verification arsenal. Interestingly it is the design… Read More
If you have been involved in software development you have probably heard of the “waterfall” development methodology. This is the approach whereby a complete specification of the software is developed before a single line of code is written. Nowadays, few people develop software that way since it is too slow. And… Read More
There is never enough memory bandwidth. Well, occasionally there is but many SoCs have lots of blocks that communicate through memory, typically off-chip DRAM. In 2001 Sonics created their first solution to this problem with MemMax technology that was incorporated into their SonicsSX product. This has been used in over 100 designs… Read More
As the semiconductor design community is seeing higher and higher levels of abstraction with standard IPs and other complex, customized IPs and sub-systems integrated together at the system level, sooner than later we will find SoCs to be just assemblies of numerous IPs selected off-the-self according to the design needs and… Read More
Some background. Sonics has been in the network-on-chip (NoC) business for a long time. Nearly 18 years years. When Arteris launched their products, Sonics figured Arteris were infringing Sonics’s patents and in 2011 brought a complaint against them. Details are here. Arteris looked at a couple of their own patents (if… Read More
One of the problems with chips today is that of so-called “dark silicon”. We can put massive functionality on an SoC today. A billion transistors, and that is just at 28nm. But power constraints (both leakage and dynamic power) limit how much of the chip can be powered up at any one time. In some cases this is not that big… Read More
We have had the Snowden revelations that the NSA has gone rogue, Target lost a zillion credit cards, the Heartbleed bug meaning that main security protocol of the internet had been coded up wrong for a couple of years, theft of records from RSA and more. One result is that people do not completely trust a security system that depends… Read More
As SoCs have got more complex, and with a larger and larger software content, it is no longer good enough to just monitor how the design behaves using simulation and then completely forget about it once the design is complete. What is required is the capability to monitor the design in real time (in silicon or FPGA) to see how it is behaving.… Read More
Success in a business with extended design-in cycles may look easy. In reality, there is a delicate balance between many factors. Some come to mind immediately: developing and releasing a good product in the first place; winning and keeping the right customers, not too few or too many; balancing investment between support and … Read More
Sonics have been building networks-on-chips (NoCs) for a long time and have amassed a rich patent portfolio. So being granted a new one isn’t usually deemed press-release-worthy. However, their latest patent on power management is pretty significant. It is patent 8,601,288 titled “Intelligent Power Controller”.
Historically… Read More
