ChipStart teams with Sonics to advance subsystem SoC architectures

PALO ALTO, USA: ChipStart LLC, a semiconductor IP and silicon solution company, has reached a new reseller agreement with Sonics Inc. to collaborate and bring to market next generation SoC architectures based on ChipStart’s SoC System Manager (SSM) subsystem IP and Sonics Network-on-Chip (NoC) solutions.

“As on-chip connectivity solutions continue to incorporate networking and telecommunications techniques to improve IP core interoperability efficiency it is natural that SoC architectures would evolve to support control and data plane components,” said Howard Pakosh, president and CEO ChipStart LLC.

“The marriage of the pioneering work Sonics has done in driving on-chip network technologies with ChipStart’s pioneering work around control plane based system management now enables SoC developers to take the next evolutionary step and integrate their independent IPs into subsystems architectures.”

Under the agreement, ChipStart will represent Sonics as a reseller of Sonics’ on-chip network solutions. ChipStart will also provide platform architecture “templates” based on ChipStart’s SSM and Sonics products that offers control and data plane system management functionality for subsystem IP based SoCs.

Separating the control and data planes is a more scalable way for SoC architectures to grow. A control plane directly addresses the growing trend towards managing system functions, such as power, security, error recovery, and boot/reset sequencing, through more tightly coupled means with the operating system and applications running on the SoC. Reducing the burden of managing these comparatively slower speed system management tasks enables SoC developers to focus their on-chip networks on achieving higher performance data throughput, especially when accessing off-chip DRAM.

“We are pleased to collaborate with ChipStart on the progression of innovative SoC design strategies,” said Jack Browne, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Sonics.

“SoC designs that leverage the use of IP subsystems based on multiple IP cores have been recognized by Semico Research Corp. and others as an important opportunity for savings in design resources with time-to-market benefits. ChipStart’s approach using control and data planes reduces the overall complexities necessary to optimize system performance and power when trying to manage all the IP cores in the subsystem.”

ChipStart templates will available in Q4 2010. SSM and Sonics products are available now for sale through ChipStart.