Sonics Selected by Toshiba for Next-Generation Product Development

Sonics’ High-Performance System IP Selected by Toshiba for New R&D Initiative Aimed at Embedded Multimedia Applications

MILPITAS, Calif. -- June 18, 2012 – Sonics, Inc.®, the world’s number one supplier of on-chip communications IP, today announced it collaborated with Toshiba Corporation Semiconductor & Storage Products Company “Toshiba” for next-generation product development in embedded multimedia and automotive SoC designs.  Last week, Toshiba unveiled plans for the company’s new product development project at the 2012 IEEE Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu, Hawaii.   

During the conference, Toshiba introduced a low-power, many-core SoC for multimedia applications that will be implemented in 40nm CMOS technology. Within a 209.3mm2 die, two 32-core clusters are integrated with dynamically reconfigurable processors, hardware accelerators, 2-channel DDR3 I/Fs, and other peripherals. The high scalability and low-power consumption is accomplished by the parallelized firmware for multimedia applications, such as the full-HD H.264 decoding and the 4K2K super resolution in less than 1W.

As part of the SoC design project, SonicsSX™ was specifically used as a high-performance on-chip network for connection between the many-core clusters and other modules.  Sonics’ solution was used to manage the high traffic flows between the sub-modules and enable Toshiba to build a large, complex SoC in an extremely short timeframe.  As part of Sonics’ ongoing subsystem strategy and technology focus, the company continues to work with top semiconductor leaders to drive increased performance, system efficiencies and memory bandwidth optimization on-chip.  

SonicsSX is one of Sonics’ highest performance products with up to 16GB/s bandwidth per port, and is ideal for achieving the data throughput requirements for today’s advanced SoCs.   SonicsSX contains a high-performance, advanced fabric and comprehensive set of data flow services for the development of complex, multi-core and multi-subsystem SoCs—and can ideally serve as a local subsystem or global on-chip network solution. 
 “Toshiba has been Sonics’ valued design partner for more than a decade, and during that time our collaborations have pushed the barriers of the ever-evolving SoC landscape—spanning generations of popular consumer entertainment innovations worldwide,” said Jack Browne, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Sonics.  “Today, Sonics continues to help Toshiba rapidly build highly sophisticated designs with optimized performance and efficiencies, pushing innovative power barriers as well as dramatically improving parallelism and helping the company scale to new levels in advanced embedded design.”
 
About Sonics
Sonics, Inc. is a pioneer of network-on-chip (NoC) technology and today offers SoC designers the world's largest portfolio of intelligent, on-chip communications solutions for home entertainment, wireless, networking and mobile devices.  With a broad array of silicon-proven IP, Sonics helps designers eliminate memory bottlenecks associated with complex, high-speed SoC design, streamline and unify data flows and solve persistent network challenges in embedded systems with multiple cores.  As the leading supplier of on-chip communications networks, Sonics has more than 110 patent properties and has enabled its customers to ship more than one billion chips worldwide.  Founded in 1996, Sonics is headquartered in Milpitas, Calif. with offices worldwide.  For more information, please visit www.sonicsinc.com, and www.sonicsinc.com/blog