Sonics offers free evaluation for designers of Sonics Network for AMBA protocol (SNAP) solution

MILPITAS, USA: Sonics Inc., a premier supplier of intelligent on-chip communications solutions, announced that its Sonics Network for AMBA Protocol (SNAP) will offer SoC designers, free-of-charge, tools and IP for capturing and analyzing bus designs with the release of its new Web-based SNAP evaluation environment.

This new product simplifies the evaluation process of Sonics IP, helps designers with their on-chip network designs and eliminates the need for complicated licenses inherent in conventional IP evaluations.

As a unique IP delivery system, SNAP features an intuitive design capture tool, downloadable from the Sonics Web site, to automate and enhance SoC design and evaluation. With little or no training, developers can capture and analyze their SoC bus designs and gain valuable insights into the performance, gate count and power early in the design stage. Once the design is evaluated, the designer can license SNAP from Sonics to complete the process.

Announced last spring, 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 an IP block. SNAP 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.

“Sonics now makes it easy and accessible for designers to test-drive SoC bus designs free-of-charge,” said Frank Ferro, director of business development for Sonics. “We believe it’s the most cost-effective way for designers to not only try before they buy, but also evaluate their designs and dramatically simplify that ‘make vs. buy’ decision.”

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. SNAP includes support for AHB and APB protocols along with optional upgrades for AXI and OCP.

Additionally, SNAP enables easy re-use and preserves legacy IP. The investment made in earlier generation cores is fully maintained as system upgrades become necessary.