Sonics Upgrades Flagship On-Chip Network to Improve Memory Subsystem Support and Quality of Service

Milpitas, Calif. – July 22, 2014 – Sonics, Inc., the world’s foremost supplier of on-chip network (NoC) technologies and services, today introduced a major upgrade of its SonicsGN™ on-chip network intellectual property (IP) that improves support for memory subsystems and provides higher performance with guaranteed bandwidth allocation across multiple system-on-chip (SoC) flows. Sonics has incorporated its patented, production-proven memory subsystem and non-blocking concurrency technologies from the MemMax™ and SonicsSX™ products into SonicsGN. These upgrades enable SonicsGN to support the latest DDR4 and LPDDR4 memories with highest performance and quality of service (QoS) for both compute and communication traffic on multi-core SoCs.

With these upgrades, SonicsGN fully supports the multi-threading capabilities of the Open Core Protocol (OCP) interface that reduce contention for and increase performance of SoC memory resources. Sonics’ scalable model for ensuring QoS, which has been used in production SoCs for more than a decade, is the most accurate and efficient approach to allocating resource bandwidth while ensuring low latencies. Sonics’ QoS model assigns SoC traffic into three different classes: high priority, guaranteed bandwidth, and best effort; and optimizes memory subsystem performance based on the network traffic flow. SonicsGN’s target-based agent performance measurement is conducted as close as possible to the memory controller, which delivers greater throughput than on-chip networks that rely on more conservative, initiator-side approaches.

“Sonics is committed to continuous improvement of its architectural IP solutions,” said Drew Wingard, CTO of Sonics. “We have more engineers working on our interconnect fabrics than all of our competitors combined. Based on strong customer interest and input, we are executing an aggressive product roadmap that makes SonicsGN the most advanced and efficient on-chip network available. SonicsGN now handles the bandwidth and performance requirements for SoC designs across a broad range of applications and markets from low-end IoT sensors to bleeding-edge mobile devices. It allows designers to rapidly integrate hundreds of IP cores with a simplified physical design methodology that addresses complexity and time-to-market challenges of today’s leading semiconductor processes.”

SonicsGN version 2.2 is available immediately. Contact your Sonics sales representative for more information.

About Sonics, Inc.
Sonics, Inc. (Milpitas, Calif.) is the global leader in trusted on-chip network (NoC) technologies used by the industry’s top semiconductor and electronics product companies. Sonics was the first company to develop and commercialize NoCs, accelerating volume production of complex systems-on-chip (SoC) that contain multiple processor cores. Our comprehensive NoC portfolio delivers the communication performance required by today’s most advanced consumer digital, communications and information technology devices. Sonics’ NoCs are integral to the success of SoC design platforms that innovators such as Broadcom®, Intel®, Marvell®, MediaTek, and Microchip® rely on to meet their most demanding SoC integration and time-to-market requirements. Sonics’ holds more than 138 patent properties supporting products created by a global customer list that have shipped more than two billion SoCs. For more information, visit sonicsinc.com