Nexell Licenses SonicsGN On-Chip Network To Integrate Customer-Specific Application Processor Design

Korean SoC and IP Company Adopts SonicsStudio Director Development Environment for Ease-of-Integration with Samsung EDA Tool and Manufacturing Flows

MILPITAS, Calif., Dec. 18, 2014 -- Sonics, Inc., the world's foremost supplier of on-chip network (NoC) technologies and services, today announced that Nexell has licensed SonicsGN™ and adopted the SonicsStudio^® Director development environment for creation of a customer-specific application processor design targeted to the digital consumer and communication systems market segments. Nexell, founded in 2009, is a Korean-based developer of systems-on-chip (SoC), semiconductor IP, and application processors. The company plans to target its new application processor design, which includes the SonicsGN NoC, for manufacturing in Samsung's 28nm low-power Gate First High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) foundry process technology. Nexell will use SonicsStudio Director as its SoC integration environment to drive design and verification within the Samsung EDA tool and manufacturing flows.

"Nexell's purchase of Sonics' IP and development environment is a strong vote of confidence for our advanced NoC technology and tools," said Grant Pierce, CEO of Sonics. "Nexell is well-respected for its video IP and SoC design expertise. This is a very important win for Sonics as it validates our advanced NoC in the evolution of this particular customer-specific application processor design, which previously relied upon competitive on-chip network solutions. We are honored to earn Nexell's trust and working relationship."

SonicsGN is Sonics' flagship NoC product that provides the industry's highest communication fabric speeds and scalability. Nexell is using SonicGN for its advanced NoC capabilities that enable rapid integration of the company's heterogeneous, multi-core SoCs containing many power and timing domains. With SonicsStudio Director, Nexell designers of every level of experience are performing the steps necessary—from architectural exploration to RTL generation—to easily integrate IP blocks and configure an optimal network fabric for its complex SoCs. SonicsStudio Director streamlines interaction with widely adopted tools for SystemC and logic simulation, performance analysis, and includes support for logic synthesis, power partitioning, top-level chip assembly, and IP-XACT import and export.

"Rapidly increasing SoC design complexity outstretched the capabilities of our existing interconnect fabrics, so we turned to Sonics' NoCs for their high performance, configurability, and ease of integration," said Tae Won Kang (Neo Kang), CEO of Nexell. "We have finite engineering resources and using a proven NoC solution from Sonics allows our development team to focus its attention on our own value-added IP and optimization of the chip architecture for performance, power, security, and silicon area. We see Sonics' NoCs and tools becoming key components in our SoC product development platform as it evolves in 2015 and beyond."

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. We are a catalyst for design methodology change and actively drive industry conversation on the Agile IC LinkedIn group. Sonics' holds more than 138 patent properties supporting customer products that have shipped more than two billion SoCs. For more information, visit sonicsinc.com.