Sonics And Northwest Logic Partner On High Throughput Memory Subsytem Solutions

Focus on SOC Designs for Machine Learning, Computer Vision, UHD Video Processing, and Enterprise SSD Applications

SAN JOSE, Calif., May 9, 2017 -- Sonics, Inc., the world's foremost supplier of Network On-Chip (NoC) and power management technologies and services and Northwest Logic, a leading provider of high performance IP cores, today announced their partnership to deliver high throughput memory subsystem solutions for complex System-On-Chip (SOC) designs. The companies' partnership, which is being driven by a mutual customer SOC design win, integrates Sonics' flagship interconnect fabric, SonicsGN® NoC, and Sonics' MemMax® memory scheduler with Northwest Logic's family of HBM2, DDRx, LPDDRx memory controllers.

"As DRAM data rates increase, the number of pipelined outstanding transactions required to achieve full throughput grows dramatically," said Drew Wingard, CTO of Sonics. "This requires more intelligent transaction scheduling that considers both the bandwidth and latency requirements of pending requests and the page and bank states of DRAM. Without careful coordination between the NoC, memory scheduler, and memory controller, the subsystem will miss data transfer deadlines and suffer performance degradation at several points along the memory subsystem transaction path. Our partnership with Northwest Logic ensures that MemMax's scheduling decisions produce a transaction stream enabling Northwest Logic's controllers to efficiently map into memory commands that fully leverage the customer's chosen DRAM technology."

"Northwest Logic and Sonics share an uncompromising commitment to customer success," said Brian Daellenbach, President of Northwest Logic. "We are seeing a significant uptick in demand for high throughput memory subsystems that address data-intensive applications and markets such as Machine Learning, Computer Vision, UHD Video Processing, and Enterprise SSD. Our memory controllers have a strong industry reputation for delivering high-performance, high quality, and ease-of-use. Our partnership with Sonics enables us to provide our mutual customers with a complete memory subsystem solution that also takes into account the need for high performance NoCs that support multi-channel memory subsystem architectures and integrate all of the cores in the system."

The Sonics-Northwest Logic high throughput memory subsystem solutions are currently in use with leading SOC design customers and available immediately. For more information, contact your Sonics or Northwest Logic representative.

About Northwest Logic
Northwest Logic, founded in 1995 and located in Beaverton, Oregon, provides high-performance, silicon-proven, easy-to-use IP cores including high-performance PCI Express Solution (PCI Express 4.0/3.0/2.1/1.1 cores, DMA cores and drivers), Memory Interface Solution (HBM2, DDR4/3, LPDDR4/3, MRAM, RLDRAM 3), and MIPI Solution (CSI-2, DSI-2, DSI). These solutions support a full range of platforms including ASICs, Structured ASICs and FPGAs. For additional information, visit www.nwlogic.com.

About Sonics, Inc.
Sonics, Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) is the trusted leader in on-chip network (NoC) and power-management technologies used by the world's top semiconductor and electronics product companies, including Broadcom®, Intel®, Marvell®, MediaTek, and Microchip®. Sonics was the first company to develop and commercialize NoCs, accelerating volume production of complex systems-on-chip (SoC) that contain multiple processor cores. Based on the ICE-Grain™ Power Architecture, Sonics' ICE-G1™ is the industry's first complete Energy Processing Unit (EPU), which enables rapid development of SoC power management subsystems. Sonics is also a catalyst for ongoing discussions about design methodology change via the Agile IC Methodology LinkedIn group. Sonics holds approximately 150 patent properties supporting customer products that have shipped more than four billion SoCs. For more information, visit sonicsinc.com, and follow us on Twitter (@sonicsinc) and LinkedIn.