Twelve Years of Sonics at Toshiba

Sonics announced today that Toshiba has completed the SoC design using Sonics’ on-chip network IP for its new TZ2100 group of application processors. The TZ2100 group of applications processors are the newest addition to Toshiba’s ApP Lite (Application Processor Lite) TZ2000 series. With this group of ApP Lite devices, sound and image communications can be securely processed at high speeds, making them well-suited for applications such as smart appliances, industrial CPUs, panel-control systems, and machine-to-machine [M2M] communication modules. The IoT will see more and more devices connected to the Internet and to each other. Increasingly, functions to effectively process and safely transfer a wide variety of data, from simple text to data-heavy audio and visual sources, are required for IoT. ApP Lite microprocessors are ideal for such processing.

What is perhaps even more significant is that Toshiba have been using Sonics NoC technology for 12 years and have completed over 30 designs. Cumulatively they have shipped over 200 million SoCs in which Sonics’ NoCs serve as the communication fabric. These cover a wide range of different target markets: gaming, digital TV, mobile, and automotive applications, and now the TZ2000 series, application processors. As you would expect, over those dozen years the designs have got increasingly complex in terms of both the number of IP blocks integrated and the performance, both increasing clock speed and using increasingly advanced process nodes.

Katsuya Konisha, who is GM of the Logic LSI Design Department emphasizes that Toshiba will be continuing to use Sonics NoCs going forward:Sonics’ on-chip network products play a critical role in the integration of our complex SoC designs. They help us achieve the time-to-market and performance requirements for these projects. We are very pleased to reach this important milestone in our relationship and plan to continue using Sonics’ IP in our ASSPs and ASICs.

Sonics also announced that that Nexell has licensed SonicsGN and adopted the SonicsStudio Director development environment for creation of a customer-specific application processor design targeted to the digital consumer and communication systems market segments. Nexell, founded in 2009, is a Korean-based developer of SoCs, semiconductor IP, and application processors. The company plans to target its new application processor design, which includes the SonicsGN NoC, for manufacturing in Samsung’s 28nm low-power Gate First High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) foundry process technology. Nexell will use SonicsStudio Director as its SoC integration environment to drive design and verification within the Samsung EDA tool and manufacturing flows.

UPDATE: the webinar has been moved to Wednesday February 4th.

Also, I will be moderating a new webinar Using SonicsGN to Address Low Power Requirements from IoT to Servers. The webinar will be at 10am Pacific on Wednesday February 4th. The webinar itself will be presented by Drew Wingard, the CTO of Sonics.

For more information on the webinar, including registration, go here. On that page you can also view the last Sonics webinar that I moderated, NoC 101. This is an introduction to network-on-chip technology for designers who are unfamiliar with the concept.