Sonics, Inc. - The Official Blog

As we begin another year, I wanted to personally wish you a successful and prosperous 2010. We are excited about kicking off another year here at Sonics and looking forward to seeing all the technology innovations from our customers and partners across the semiconductor and IP markets . We are pleased to see that analysts remain bullish about the role of IP, and most say that IP is expected to become even more integral to the SoC process as we move to increasingly more complex designs and advanced nodes of 45nm and below.

I wanted to share some recent Sonics milestones with you— that continue to demonstrate Sonics’ vision and leadership, as well as the pivotal role IP is playing in system performance and the SoC design process. With the company’s increased customer traction, Sonics recently announced it surpassed the 750 million unit mark with total licensee shipments, and is now on track to reach one billion units by year-end. Our customers’ design innovations have helped Sonics grow to become the world’s number one supplier of silicon-proven IP for on-chip networks and the only IP company that allows designers to integrate any IP from anywhere, anytime to deliver an SoC with the right features into the market at the right time. We look forward to sharing our plans with you as we invest in technology, expand our global presence even further this year and continue to maintain a world-class engineering organization that is larger than any of our competitors.

From netbooks and Wi-Fi routers to mobile internet devices and HDTVs, Sonics has long been a leader in digital, home and mobile entertainment, with tremendous growth being fueled by many of today’s hottest consumer markets. Following one of our strongest product cycles in years, Sonics continues to address customer demand at every level of the market, and recently unveiled SNAP, a low-cost platform to simplify on-chip bus designs for complex embedded SoCs.

As a pioneer in network-on-chip (NoC) technology, Sonics has been helping semiconductor companies tackle their most challenging memory, bandwidth and on-chip connectivity issues for more than 13 years. Sonics’ mission is to help companies achieve their SoC integration and time-to-market goals, and to cost-effectively solve today’s most critical hardware, software, performance and power challenges on-chip. We help semiconductor companies choose from the most advanced on-chip network technologies to deliver the performance necessary to build quality, value-added SoCs, and keep pace with the rapidly moving consumer electronics markets.

Here’s to your success in 2010! We look forward to seeing you at these industry events in your area.

Grant Pierce
President & CEO
Sonics, Inc.
www.sonicsinc.com
www.twitter.com/sonicsinc

This week Sonics released its SNAP™ product (Sonics’ Network for AMBA Protocol) for general availability! That means that you can go download it and take it for a test drive… Now! Free of charge!

Sonics' SNAP Cature Tool - GUI Screenshot

SNAP is Sonics’ brand new, client-based solution for designing on-chip buses for any complex SoC. With SNAP, you can capture, test, and analyze your designs quickly and easily. Earlier this year, we announced SNAP as a cost-effective, turn-key solution for SoC designers. Now it’s available for everyone!  SNAP’s unique IP delivery system allows you to quickly and easily download the SNAP design capture tool from the Sonics Website, install and go. No need to worry about complicated licenses and key files inherent in other conventional tools. SNAP allows you to explore various chip bus architectures via an intuitive GUI, delivering valuable insight into performance, gate count and power early in the design stage—while seamlessly creating a rapid and reliable SoC design environment.

SNAP helps to simplify on-chip bus design for complex embedded SoCs by turning multilayer bus designs into an IP block. The product is well-suited for embedded wireless, home networking and automotive applications, including 3G/4G baseband and WiMAX baseband, gateways and wireless routers, and automotive control and telematics. As a complete platform solution, SNAP lowers development costs by reducing engineering costs for multi-layer designs. For example, all arbitration, clocks, data width and protocol conversions are done automatically.

So, how do you know if SNAP is right for you? Are you experiencing any of the following?

• You have an increasing number of cores with new and legacy interfaces
• You’re reaching the limits of AHB bus performance
• You’re using an ever increasing amount of engineering resources due to the shortcomings of your existing bus design tools and methodology
• You’re evolving designs to incorporate faster processors like ARM (AXI) or MIPS (OCP)
• You’re re-architecting a design to optimize for low power
• You’re hitting the memory bottleneck with your current solution

If so, then SNAP may be just what you’re looking for: A simple to use, low-cost alternative to your current SoC design tools and methodology.

SNAP - Sonics Network for AMBA Protocol - Download Now!

Go to http://www.sonicsinc.com/snap.htm and download your free copy today. We’d love to hear your thoughts. And make sure to stay tuned for upcoming customer and partner feedback and how these companies are simplifying their on-chip bus designs with SNAP.

Stephen Tomasello at Sonics, Inc.
http://twitter.com/S_Tomasello

Sonics Application Architect, Pascal Chauvet, discusses the need for IP-XACT vendor extensions for configurable bus interfaces in the latest issue of Electronique International (No 688).

EI – 688 – Sonics

I did not expect attending MemCon last week would be the impetus to drag me ‘kicking-and-screaming’ into the social networking age. While I struggled with Twitter being a natural part of my daily routine, my resistance seemed to somehow be an admission that I am getting older (which I don’t mind admitting). But as a ‘high tech marketing professional’ I want to understand these “killer apps” first hand and how it will drive much of the semiconductor and software development activities over the next few years. Jim Elliot, VP of Memory Marketing at Samsung, talked in his keynote address about these killer apps, and he also admitted his first tweet was that morning in preparation for his keynote. Not to be outdone, I took out my Blackberry Storm and composed my debut tweet for the masses – adding my two cents to the world out there. It was a little bit of a rush and then I waited…nothing happened. I felt anxious so I tweeted again to make sure I wasn’t talking to myself, and suddenly…someone else from the same conference was following me and I followed him. Pretty cool (I think). The resistance was over … for now.

Of course, the importance of all this to the memory industry is the increased server usage along with the increasing size of memory in mobile devices. The PC and high-performance servers are the leading products driving the need to convert from DDR2 to DDR3 memory, and the mobile devices market is driving the requirements for low-power DDR. Here are some quick stats from the Keynote: 20% of the daily internet use is driven by social networking sites, Facebook is now the Number 3 Internet site with 100M users/day with 30M of these users being mobile. Twitter use has increased 7x from December ‘08 to April ‘09 with 32M unique visits. This is good news for driving hardware sales in an industry that has not had too much good news this year—with a 10% decrease in memory revenue, reduced PC sales (-3%) for the first time since the dotcom bust and cell phone unit volume is down 8%. The two bright spots, however, are the smart phone segment (13% growth in ‘09) and the Netbooks (AKA MIDs or Smartbooks) which are driving the LPDDR sales.

According to Samsung, <5% of the DDR market volume in 2008 was DDR3 with expected growth up to 35% of the market in 2009. The advantage to the server market of using DDR3 is a significant reduction in the number of servers needed to maintain the same performance, providing lower cost and lower power (electric bills, in this case). The primary advantage to the PC market is improved performance with lower power (battery) due to faster memory access (memory is on less time). All this discussion about faster memory access dovetailed nicely with Sonics recent announcement last week of its combined DDR controller with advanced memory scheduler supporting both DDR2 and DDR3 memories. Adding DDR3 to a system increases its performance but risks lowering overall access efficiency. So having a good memory scheduler is critical to maximize the DDR3 upgrade.

Needless to say, there was a lot of additional information from this Keynote and the conference that bears mention, but in the spirit of my newfound Twitter skills and forced pithiness, MemCon can be summed in less than 140 characters: More performance = lower power consumption and lower cost. One attendee said that it should have been called ‘Low-Power Con.’ Let me know what you think….You can follow me on Twitter @fferrosonics, or, of course, send me a ‘DM’.

Last Thursday I was at the San Jose airport flying the AA nerd bird to Austin with my wife. No, not for business this time, but to join the celebration of my son’s wedding. But, the real world goes on around us 24 x 7 x 365!! So I am on a conference call with the other participants for IP-Extreme’s Constellations program on how to more effectively reach new customers.

As we shared anecdotes from our recent travels, one common observation regarding design programs – even with the workforce reductions that have become common place — is the consensus operating mode for most semiconductor companies is, as Warren Savage, IP-Extreme CEO says, “keep the schedule the customer originally wanted for the next product, even with fewer resources.”

Then… as I am in line to check baggage – and what a line it is — severe thunderstorms at DFW have shaken the schedules and the lines are getting overwhelming. Well, I am keeping my schedule, so I participate in my next 45-min conference call standing in the line waiting to check in. After the call ends, still in the same line in what seems like the same place, I am talking to the guy behind me. He worked at IBM, contributed to the AA Sabre reservation system and later went on to a fruitful career at Altera, where he recently retired. It turns out, he has a great idea for a new company and is now working to get first round funding. (I have two other CEO friends doing similar fund raising activities now as well).

We are talking about how important persistence is in the face of daily economic and business challenges. We both agreed how important it is to continue to work on your plan and not back off of the original vision.

So my new friend and I are talking away and we review our common experiential learning – need to have a good product with great confidence in the product’s capabilities; need to have a focused strategy that sustains your initiatives as prospects consider, evaluate and validate your product’s delivered value. And, of course – luck and timing – winning the right designs is key to moving ahead. The ultimate moral of this story: Combining a good product with the right schedule usually beats a better product entering a late market!

Schedules matter – getting a good enough solution to create value for our customers helps them make money. Too many times we want to take more time to provide a product that exceeds the requirements, then wonder why our customers don’t value what we provide.

Same message from a different market segment – Strategy Analytics’ recent update of market share for the mobile handset market shows that “Other” is growing. When looking how the Top 5 suppliers are faring – ‘Other’ has grown 30% in the last 5 calendar quarters. In many cases, the range of suppliers categorized as other are providing a ‘good enough’ solution to stimulate consumer purchase. In business, that’s a real tradeoff that inherently occurs, but it often seals the fate of a product’s overall effectiveness and market penetration.

For Sonics, in our customer meetings, we work to understand the critical measures that define ‘good enough’ and then show how we help the customer deliver a compelling product. Sonics enables the use of any IP, from any source, any time – and our customers have 100 successful designs to date, and have shipped more than 500M units, and counting…

Jack Browne at Sonics, Inc.
twitter.com/Jackb650

Gartner Semiconductor Briefing - San Jose - June 11, 2009

I had the opportunity to attend Gartner’s Semiconductor Briefing on June 11 here in San Jose (you can see some of the news coming out of this session here and here). It was a good chance to get a sense for where our industry is heading as we find ourselves in the midst of the worst slump since (at least) 2001. I have to admit, going into the 8:30 session, I wasn’t hopeful. If you’ve been following Gartner’s estimates of the semiconductor market, then you know that they have reduced their forecast for the industry the last four times they’ve refreshed their numbers. I settled into my seat and prepared myself to hear more bad news. But you know what. It didn’t (really) come. The bottom line was that Gartner actually has an improved outlook for the industry for the first time in about a year. While good to hear, the real message from Gartner’s outlook on semi’s is that, we’ve got a ways to go – The feeling from them is that things are finally stabilizing (ie bottoming-out) and it is time to lay the ground work for the recovery.

Gartner Semiconductor Briefing - San Jose - June 11, 2009 - Agenda

They broke their half-day session into four key messages: Worldwide Forecast Scenario 2009: Recession, Reset, and Recovery; Recovery Enablers; Recovery Supply; and Recovery Demand. [Are you sensing a theme here?]. The first session obviously set the stage for the later topics, and was meant to reset the industry and provide an updated snapshot as to the current state of the market. So where are we today? This chart sums it up nicely:

Semiconductors: Unprecedented Decline Precedes Bumpy Recovery - Gartner - June 2009

While 2009 will certainly be bad, it’s pretty clear that we’ve hit (or are hitting) bottom at this point. This is good news for everyone as it means there appears to be a light at the end of that very long, unpredictable tunnel. One interesting nugget of information that Peter Middleton relayed during his Semiconductor Industry forecast presentation, was that we may, in fact, get a protracted recovery which gives us a little bump in the short-term, but, takes several years to be fully realized. The reason for this appears to be two-fold. First, governments all over the world have pumped a massive amount of cash into the system as part of the global financial bailout. These dollars will certainly have a short-term impact. However, once these funds are depleted, there is an expectation that these recovery cycles will then become self-sustaining. Will they? Well, that’s anyone’s guess, but it is certainly a risk moving forward. The other reason for the protracted recovery is that, unlike 2001, the semiconductor industry reacted with remarkable speed during this downturn. As a result, many companies may have yanked that chain a little bit too hard. Middleton feels like this initial phase of the recovery (late 2009 and 2010) will be driven in large part by the industry replenishing supply chains to normal levels. This says nothing however for the demand for consumer products into which much of this silicon goes. That demand is not expected to return until much later (2011-2012). The lesson here seems to be that companies should still err on the side of caution when planning for this protracted recovery.

The later morning sessions were focused on strategies for recovery. They focused attention on some of the recovery enablers seen driving growth moving forward. One of the key demand drivers for the recovery that Gartner focused on was the smartphone / mobile internet device / netbook triumvirate. Five of the nine “Recovery” presentations were specifically dedicated to, or heavily referenced these markets. From Gartner’s perspective, it seems clear that these markets, and the technologies and silicon that enable them, will be a major driver for economic recovery in the industry. The one critical factor that seems to be enabling these markets has been the emergence and consumerization of the wireless-accessible internet. Gartner was clear that this “feature” will continue to drive demand and that this will become a must-have characteristic for devices moving forward. This connectivity will obviously lead to more SoC integration of these technologies into smaller packages enabling more devices to utilize the internet as a source of content and data management.

Till next time…

Stephen Tomasello at Sonics, Inc.
http://twitter.com/S_Tomasello

Moving SoC design... Beyond the NoC

I really like Sonics new web site that was launched a few weeks ago. I am not just talking about the cool icons and the colors (which are great!), I am also referring to the short flash animation on the homepage that zips by saying: “Moving SoC designs…” (then says) “beyond the NoC”. I want to clarify what this pithy expression really means. We were not trying to be obtuse, but I hope it got you thinking about NoC (network-on-chip) technology and how exactly Sonics is “Moving beyond the NoC?” This at first may seem strange, especially if you are familiar with a ‘pure’ NoC, then you will know this is a new technology that is just now migrating into designs. So why do we want to move beyond something that is targeted for production by late 2010 – 2011? Sonics is certainly researching technology that does in fact look several years out (that’s a post for another day) but what I want to discuss here is how Sonics has already made NoC technology practical in today’s production SoCs. Maybe “practical NoC” would not sound as interesting on the website.

Sonics recently announced that its customers have shipped over half a billion chips using Sonics technology. This diverse customer base has provided us with unique insights into the requirements of SoCs in a variety of markets. These markets range from high performance video SoCs, like the ones I discussed in my last blog entry, to low-cost embedded wireless SoCs like the ones used in Wi-Fi and cellular basebands. We’ve found that today’s SoCs are not simply a set of homogeneous cores communicating with each other, but rather a combination of bandwidth, frequency, latency and various protocols, coupled with complex area and power considerations. Any one single network topology would struggle to effectively meet the performance, cost (i.e. gate count) and power consumption requirements to design a successful SoC for these competitive markets.

For example, on a single SoC you can have high performance cores that require zero latency access to memory that are best served by a low-latency switch, while other cores that can tolerate latency are better served by a low-gate count bus merger or by a peripheral network that can span longer physical distances on the chip. In addition, all of these network configurations need to be very power-efficient, especially for mobile designs. To solve these challenges, chip designers need a wide range of network configuration options giving them the flexibility to introduce fast, low-latency network switches in the critical paths while trading off bandwidth and performance on other parts of the chip to save gates and power. Typical NoC implementations can incur latency as fewer wires are prioritized with fast clocks and simple network switches. Sonics has been providing designers with a scalable wiring solution while maintaining protocol features in order to offset latency. The messaging protocol utilized by the switches avoids the serialization penalty present in standard NoCs with minimal overhead in area and allows for more complex switching operations— thereby reducing pipeline depth and the corresponding latency.

In short, ‘moving beyond the NoC’ means blending the best of several different on-chip network technologies, giving chip designers the freedom to solve real connectivity and data flow problems. Backed by a wealth of applications and production experience, Sonics is in a unique position to meet the complex SoC design requirements of today and tomorrow. I guess you can say that we learned all this through the ‘school of hard NoCs’. (I know….but I couldn’t resist). Please check Sonics’ website for more information on NoC technology and products.

Frank Ferro
Director of Business Development at Sonics, Inc.

I read with interest Samsung’s announcement stating they are outperforming the market with strong sales of their LCD and LED HDTVs. They plan to ship 22M LCD sets this year, up 10% from 2008, and had a 19% market share in Q1 2009. I certainly believe this trend is correct and I can tell you first hand that I personally account for two of these projected 22M units. I am usually late to adopt the latest in home consumer electronics mostly because I am a ‘frugal’ engineer by nature (although my wife just calls me cheap), but, with two of my 10+ yr old TVs on their last legs I had no choice but to upgrade. When I went shopping it was interesting to see that only HDTVs are available (if you discount the one lonely ‘tube’ set in the corner of the store). This certainly will account for strong HDTV sales even in a weakened economy as consumers must transition to HD. I was also surprised at how many people were actually buying HDTVs both times I was in the store since, again, we hear all the gloom and doom about the weakened economy.

One of the reasons that I chose a Samsung HDTV was because of all the positive reviews that I read online for 32” sets as I researched my options (great price/performance). It certainly did not hurt that Sonics’ technology is used by Samsung in their HDTVs. I love the picture quality of HD and, as a long time DSP engineer, I could appreciate all of the signal processing required to make these sets finally practical (de-blocking, de-ringing, edge detection, scaling, de-interlacing, noise filtering, overlays, color space conversion, just to name only a few). The bandwidth needed for all this processing is currently between 4.5-5.5Gb/s for high-end HDTV and is quickly moving to 9-11Gb/s for the next-generation designs. To accomplish all this data processing, an HDTV SoC (system-on-a-chip) typically contains two CPU cores, video decoder, video encoder, 2D graphics processor, audio decoder, NTSC/PAL decoders and a wide array of peripherals. What all these blocks have in common is that they are constantly competing for memory resources. The memory choke point in these HD SoCs has been a topic of particular interest for Sonics research. Sonics has developed algorithms for memory load balancing in a multi-channel memory system (call interleaved memory technology or IMT) along with an advanced memory scheduler to optimize DRAM access. As a Sonics employee, it feels good to know that we are contributing to the success of these HDTV SoC designs with our on-chip communications networks. Our connectivity products have been ideal solutions to solve the data flow management between all these cores and memory. If you are interested in more details on this topic, I encourage you watch Sonics’ CTO Drew Wingard’s presentation, ‘Feeding the Beasts: Optimized Shared Memory Solutions for MPSoCs.’

As much as I like my new HDTV, manufacturers continue to push the technology envelope with increasingly complex algorithms to improve picture quality, and, at the same time, make thinner, lower cost and lower power TVs. Faster LCD response times, for example, are moving refresh rates from 60Hz to 120Hz, and even as fast as 240Hz to reduce judder. With each new generation of HDTV designs we are seeing the memory bandwidth double. These access requirements are pushing the need to move from DDR2 to DDR3 memories making the use of Sonics’ multi-channel memory solutions even more critical. In addition to image processing, new features are being added like tweeting from your HDTV, web browsing and wireless HDMI for HD distribution in the home. Looking at the way technology is moving it is doubtful that I will be able to wait another 10 years for a new TV set.

Frank Ferro
Director of Business Development at Sonics, Inc.

Dr. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has been gracious enough to allow us to share the wonderful presentation he gave at the TSMC Technology Symposium recently held in San Jose, Ca (April 2009), entitled “Virtual Corporations: The ‘Collaborate to Innovate’ Imperative.”  His overall message: “Collaboration is needed between governments, the IC industry, and the system industry” in order to solve the complex problems of today’s design and manufacturing realities.

Sonics in TI OMAP 3 - Block diagram from the presentation: Demonstrating the power of Sonics' on-chip network solutions to enable integration of complex SoCs

Full presentation:
TSMC Technology Symposium – April 2009 – Keynote – Vincentelli

It’s official! We launched our new product, SNAP, on May 5!  If you haven’t read the press release, you can find it here.  SNAP is a cost-effective, turn-key solution designed to simplify the on-chip bus design for complex embedded SoCs by turning multilayer bus designs into a verified IP block.  Please check out our SNAP product page for more details as well as links to our SNAP Product Brief, Datasheet, and Flash Tutorial.

Check out some of the media coverage surrounding the launch!
EDN – Sonics offers interconnect IP for AMBA AHB users
EETimes – Tools helps make on-chip interconnects
Electronique International – Sonics lance une solution clé en main pour la conception des bus multicouches

Sonics SNAP Pb 041709