Founded in 2002, Sondrel is a trusted partner of choice for handling every stage of an IC's creation, renowned for ASIC design and fully complemented by turnkey services to transform designs into tested, volume-packaged silicon chips. Headquartered in the UK, Sondrel supports manufacturers around the world via its offices in China, India, France, Morocco and North America.
In 2021, Sondrel has launched a family of reference designs to reduce design costs, risk and time by up to 30%, compared to starting from scratch. The company has drawn on its experience of designing hundreds of ASICs to create a set of key reference designs that each provide a fast design time for high growth markets. The first architecture being announced is the SFA 200, for battery powered applications.
Sondrel is releasing five more IP platforms in this family, with two targeted at automotive ADAS while the other three have scalable amounts of processing power that address the needs of different application areas. This includes the SFA 100 Edge IoT data processing solution, designed for edge, low power requirements, onboard Arm CPU, sensors, and wire or wireless connections.
The SFA 200 single channel ASICs can be arrayed together to form scalable processing solutions and additional features can be added in a modular fashion. Each ASIC is based on a CPU cluster for general purpose tasks and an AI cluster for neural network tasks with supporting memory and interfaces. The CPU cluster of Arm CPU cores, nominally 4, provide a powerful processing capability by using either an Arm A53 or A55 with 9 - 10 GMIPS at 1 GHz nominal. The Neural Net cluster is based on either Arm Ethos cores or DSP-AI cores providing nominally 4 TOPS performance. Custom AI cores can be integrated as an alternate if required.
The chip design has a composable Network on Chip system fabric, multi-path, multi-width (64b to 512b) data path at a nominal 800MHz. There is performance optimization of the data flow for application, QoS arbitration and scheduling support. The System Management Subsystem (SMS) manages the configuration, start-up (Boot) and operation modes of the SoC along with active power management for low or battery powered applications.
The integral security subsystem uses either an Arm A53 or M33, as the application demands, to provide activity/intrusion monitoring, software signing and crypto, and authentication to resist hacking, which is further enhanced by watchman behavior tracking and deviation detection.
The SFA 200 design just needs the customer’s own IP or application-specific, off-the-shelf IP to create the final ASIC thus providing a low risk, faster time to market that can reduce design costs by up to 30%. To further reduce risk and time to market, Sondrel offers a full turnkey service that turns designs into fully tested, shipping silicon.
www.sondrel.com
