2025 Outlook with Paul Wells of sureCore

By Daniel Nenni

February 20, 2025

Paul Wells, CEO at sureCore, an ultra-low power memory specialist, has been involved in the semiconductor industry for over 35 years. Previously, he has worked as Director of Engineering for Pace Networks where he led a multidisciplinary product development team creating a broadcast quality video and data mini-headend. Before this, he worked for Jennic Ltd as VP Operations, successfully building the team from scratch as the company transitioned to a fabless model. Prior to this, he was responsible for a team at Fujitsu Microelectronics supporting ASIC customers in Europe and Israel.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company. 

I’ve been in the semiconductor industry now for over 35 years. I began my career at Ferranti Electronics in Manchester, UK, as an ASIC engineer delivering custom chips for a wide range of innovative consumer applications. Ferranti had invented the gate array and the possibilities for its use seemed endless. I also worked for Fujitsu, Jennic and Pace Networks, holding senior engineering and operations positions, before co-founding sureCore and taking on the role of CEO back in 2011.

SureCore started out by taking a radically different view of memory. All SoC devices need embedded memory, usually SRAM, but also register files, and occasionally ROM. With the growing trend to even more integration, and the need to be able to accommodate larger software footprints, the demand for on-chip memory just kept increasing until for some devices it reached 70% die area! SRAM whilst fast is also power hungry and by analysing the traditional architectures we were able to identify some key power saving strategies that resulted in up to 50% dynamic power savings.

For many consumer and medical products, the performance delivered by modern process nodes is often overkill. Very significant power savings can be achieved by operating at much lower voltages and sureCore have been able to develop and demonstrate in silicon the industry’s lowest operating voltage SRAM. These power optimising technologies are embedded in our market-leading PowerMiser^TM and EverOn^TM product families. By exploiting our ultra-low power design expertise, we have created our sureFIT^TM custom memory development service that provides our customers with the optimal solution for their application.

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