Ian Walsh appointed as Sondrel's Regional VP for America

Santa Clara, CA – 25 July, 2024 -- Sondrel (AIM: SND), a leading provider of ultra-complex, custom chips for leading global technology brands, has appointed Ian Walsh as its Regional VP for America, with the responsibility of growing Sondrel’s US semiconductor business from its new Silicon Valley offices in Santa Clara, CA.

John Chubb, Sondrel’s CEO, said, “Ian is an incredibly experienced and well-connected veteran of the semiconductor industry, having worked for Sondrel for over five years and previously with prestigious companies such as Rockwell, Marconi, Alcatel, MIPS, ProVision, and Presto. His combination of a strong technical and commercial experience in the industry will allow Ian to immediately relate to the complex needs of our customers’ advanced projects and guide our work to successfully deliver their new custom chip designs. Starting with that foundation, Ian will lead our US-based customer collaborations from inception through to completion.”

Ian Walsh commented, “Silicon Valley has always been an amazing center for dynamic innovation and creativity. Helping companies turn their vision into silicon is a Sondrel speciality, with a long track record of success across Europe and Israel. Our ‘Design and Supply’ approach ranges from complete turnkey design and production at leading foundries all the way to team augmentation, providing access to our experienced teams with complete security of customer IP. We can engage with customers at the architectural specification phase and work with them right through to volume production – or anywhere in between. This provides exceptional flexibility to our customers, supporting them across all design and implementation stages to ensure on time and on budget delivery. I am excited to be here in Silicon Valley to help US-based customers realize the benefits that Sondrel can bring to them.”

Sondrel brings a vast experience of ultra-complex custom chips, ranging from AI to automotive certified devices. Among other benefits of partnering with Sondrel is its ‘Architecting the Future’ (ATF) design platform that provides a fast-track for new chips by leveraging work from a set of pre-defined SoC architectures. ATF enables Sondrel to reduce design times by up to 30% which can make all the difference in enabling customers to be first to market with a new innovative chip. It covers a wide range of performance and data throughput requirements allowing Sondrel to collaborate with customers on their application and software needs. Sondrel’s design architects pull from proven SOC architectures meeting the required PPA with the appropriate processors, memory and interfaces. Third party and customer IP is easily integrated through ATF’s unique approach that surrounds the IP with the appropriate interfaces to integrate seamlessly into the existing architecture.

Rich Wawrzyniak, Principal Analyst at The SHD Group, observed, “Modern chips are increasingly difficult to design, especially at advanced nodes. Whether the customer is a startup or an existing leader, leveraging skills from a proven team like Sondrel can reduce risk, speed time-to-market and lower overall costs. The combination of Sondrel’s knowledge in the leading foundry processes, state-of-the-art 3^rd party IP and SOC architectures like ATF can now be of benefit to customers here in the US.”

Walsh concluded saying, “I am really excited to bring Sondrel’s skills and experience to companies in the US where we can really make a difference accelerating product creation and shortening time-to-market. Especially for leading edge technologies such as automotive, Edge AI, vision systems and networking that can benefit from our specialized skills to create the ultra-complex custom chips required.”