New Sonics Interconnect solves power management and multimedia data flow issues in SoCs for wireless and handheld products

SonicsMX Enables Customers to Achieve Higher Design Predictability and Improve Engineering Efficiencies

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., October 18, 2004 - Sonics Inc., the premier supplier of System-on-Chip (SoC) SMART™ Interconnects, today announced its new SonicsMX™ solution for the design of low-power, cost-effective SoC devices powering multimedia-rich wireless and handheld products. Based on the company’s next-generation technology, SonicsMX provides the physical structures, advanced protocols, and extensive power management capabilities necessary to overcome data flow and other design challenges associated with the convergence of multimedia and communications onto a single SoC.

SonicsMX is the result of a close collaboration with Texas Instruments (TI) to ensure Sonics’ new SMART interconnect solution is suitable for low-power operation required by advanced wireless and handheld applications such as TI’s OMAP™ platforms. According to Grant Pierce, president and CEO of Sonics, “We announced a close working relationship with Texas Instruments last September and SonicsMX demonstrates our commitment to deliver interconnect solutions that give our customers a significant competitive advantage. We are excited to now make SonicsMX available to the general market place.”

SonicsMX is based on the company’s next-generation SMART interconnect technology. Prior generations have been used in over 60 million SoC devices, including communications and digital consumer applications. The proven capability of Sonics’ solutions uniquely positions the company for rapid growth in an emerging segment of the third-party IP market.

According to Richard Wawrzyniak, senior analyst at Semico Research Corporation, “With SoC convergence encompassing more communication, networking and multimedia functionality on chip, data flow challenges will only increase especially when development moves to 90 nanometer and below. Companies with interconnect solutions that directly address this key area of design offer a strong value proposition.”

About SonicsMX

SonicsMX addresses the exponentially rising data flow design and verification challenges associated with the continuing convergence of multimedia and communications content in wireless and handheld devices.

SonicsMX is a low power consumption, flexible interconnect, supporting cross bar, shared link, or hybrid topologies within a multithreaded and non-blocking architecture. Combining advanced features such as moderate clock rates, mixed latency requirements, quality of service management, security protection and error management, with flexibility lets SoC developers fine tune the interconnect specifically for their use and manage all communications and multimedia convergence data flow challenges. SonicsMX supports the OCP-IP 2.0 socket protocol through an active decoupled approach allowing SoC developers to design cores and interconnect strategies in parallel, and to facilitate reduced engineering for future projects using open and proven standards.

The company’s unique, “active decoupled” approach, called Sonics Methodology and Architecture for Rapid Time to market, or SMART Interconnects, lets designers utilize pre-designed, highly optimized and flexible interconnects to accurately configure, analyze, and verify data flows at the architecture phase early in the SoC design process. The ability to configure and verify internal interconnects in this phase of SoC development dramatically increases the predictability of the design. Additionally, the active decoupled approach allows engineering teams to fine tune interconnect structures in parallel with core development and integration. This improves engineering productivity for a given SoC design and across a product line because all elements are replaceable and reusable with little or no incremental engineering effort.

SonicsStudio™, an integrated tool suite to configure SonicsMX for specific implementations, is also useful to analyze data flows and execute performance verification testing. A SystemC model is available for SonicsMX that further facilitates system modeling and verification using electronic system level products (ESL) from electronic design automation vendors. SonicsMXC™ can deliver outputs for ESL or RTL environments, so that the same source is used for development. In this manner, software engineers and system architects can work in parallel with great confidence in the predictability of their overall SoC design.

Availability

SonicsMX is currently available. For further information and pricing please contact the company at +1-650-938-2500.

About Sonics

Sonics, Inc. is a leading provider of SMART Interconnects that deliver high SoC design predictability and increase design efficiency. Major semiconductor and systems companies including Broadcom, Samsung, Texas Instruments and Toshiba have applied Sonics SMART Interconnects in leading products in the wireless, digital multimedia and communications markets. Sonics is a privately held company funded by Investar Capital, Smart Technology Ventures, TL Ventures, Easton Hunt Capital, JAFCO Ventures, and H&Q Asia-Pacific. For more information, see www.sonicsinc.com

SMART, SonicsMX, SonicsMXC, SiliconBackplane, SonicsStudio and MemMax are trademarks of Sonics, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective