ISRAEL'S BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY PRODUCES COMPLEX SOC USING SonicsGN NoC AS INTEGRATION FABRIC

SoC Lab Attributes Fast Timing Closure to Sonic' NoC Performance

San Jose, Calif. , Mar. 28, 2017 – Sonics, Inc., the world's foremost supplier of on-chip network (NoC) and power management technologies and services, today announced that the SoC Lab at Israel's Bar-Ilan University has designed and fabricated a complex system-on-chip (SoC) based on an SoC platform that employs the SonicsGN® NoC as the top-level interconnect fabric. The student design team used SonicsGN to integrate 6 initiator cores and more than 50 targets in the research chip, which runs at 750 MHz and was manufactured in TSMC's 28 nm process technology.

"Bar-Ilan is part of Israel's outstanding university system which prepares world-class EE talent to meet the challenges of developing important breakthroughs in electronics," said Grant Pierce, CEO of Sonics. "We are excited to contribute our production-proven NoC technology to assist in the education of these exceptional engineering students. The hands-on familiarity they gain with our technologies in the SoC Lab gives them a distinct advantage when it comes time to find employment after graduation."

"We appreciate the contributions from all of our industry partners to the success of the SoC Lab including Sonics," said Professor Alexander Fish at Bar-Ilan University. "Sonics' NoC and development environment are particularly valuable to our chip design research efforts because they enable rapid connection of all the other blocks in the system to meet our performance objectives. Sonics also provided strong technical support during the development process."

The SoC Lab at Bar-Ilan was launched with the close support of Ceragon and it maintains close ties with all the HiPer Consortium industrial members. The Lab has developed the infrastructure, tools, and know-how for the rapid integration of SoCs in 28nm or smaller geometries. The Lab aims to become a center of expertise for the Israeli chip design industry, where academics and industrialists can combine their knowledge and experience, thus ensuring that Israeli companies can maintain their technological and competitive edge.

"Ceragon assisted the SoC Lab with the front-to-back design flow including specification, integration, verification, and layout of this complex SoC," said Yonatan Shoshan, team lead at the SoC Lab. "Using the SonicsGN high-performance NoC as the integration fabric for the IP blocks enabled the design team to rapidly close timing during the physical design phase."

About Bar-Ilan's SoC Lab

The SoC Lab, funded by the Magnet Program of the Ministry of Economy, was established to address multiple challenges of SoC design. SoC complexity is exponentially growing due to increasing demand for integration, compute capabilities, and efficiency. This complexity brings challenges in design, integration, verification and implementation. In addition, when time to market is a significant factor, an optimized generic flow is necessary.

For the first time, Israel has a scaled SoC design, implementation, and measurement laboratory that combines academic research with actual industry requirements. As a part of the HiPer consortium project, the Lab teams together with the industry partners like Sonics and Ceragon to develop a generic and scalable SOC platform on which different research projects can be explored, implemented, and tested. The Lab's vision is to help lower the "highly advanced technologies entry bar" for Israeli companies by providing a generic SoC Platform, and thus allowing them to focus on innovation by the reduction of overheads.

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.

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