Embedded Technology
40 years of expertise S
Socionext describes why it’s a good partner to do business with
ocionext is a global supplier of System-on-Chip solutions
with over 40 years of experience. In fact, its name, SOCIONEXT, re- flects its focus on Custom SoC solutions for today’s leading- edge dynamic applications within the Automotive, Industrial and Network environments. The company’s focus is on
providing innovative products and solutions for situations that need advanced process technologies with challenging complexity and have demanding performance requirements. These challenging complex
applications need Custom SoCs. Why? Well, many companies designing products do not have the luxury of in-house design for an ASIC approach. But, when faced with the situation of no available off-the-shelf components a Custom SoC is the solution.
ASIC and Custom SoCs The design specification or chip content as well as the interface and design responsibilities between customer and the chip supplier are a key consideration here. In a traditional ASIC, the chip design is the responsibility of the customer, based on technology libraries delivered by the chip supplier. The design is delivered to the supplier in the form of a technology specific gate-level description (‘netlist’) or as a higher-level software description (‘RTL’). The chip supplier then handles the conversion of the customer design into a physical chip, including packaging and test of the final product. Each party must take responsibility for its part in the overall design. ASICs may (and often do)
include multiple macro-IP blocks supplied by the chip vendor, but do not necessarily include any dedicated CPU functionality. A System-on-Chip solution (by its very definition) is based around
a CPU or multiple CPU subsystems and acts as the central processing element in the final system. In addition to the CPU(s), the SoC will also contain any number of other processing units, such as ISP, DSP or GPU as well as other dedicated IP blocks for functions such as high-speed external interfaces. In order to design an ASIC,
customers have to have either a dedicated internal chip design team or at a minimum in-house experts to interface to an external design partner. This may be difficult to justify when the number of custom designs required is limited. By comparison, a Custom SoC approach offers additional options, with the chip supplier taking more of the design responsibility. This may range from a ‘Platform-based’ approach (where the supplier offers pre-verified subsystems) to a ‘spec-in ‘design where the supplier takes full responsibility for the complete design process. The company’s focus applications are particularly relevant for Custom SoCs. Within the Automotive Sector
there is a move towards autonomous vehicles and a huge change in the way they are designed. In-vehicle infotainment and advanced driver assistance systems are merging to enhance the driving experience whilst increasing safety. The car of the future will integrate a large number of different sensor technologies such as cameras, radar, LiDAR and ultrasound, which require massive amounts of data to be generated. Achieving these high levels of performance and integration whilst at the same time minimising chip size, cost and power consumption will open new opportunities for customisation which may be the only option to achieve the required design objectives.
IoT and Industry 4.0 Challenges from networking and data handling to machine vision are just some of the complex applications that need to be addressed within the Industrial environment, particularly in view of the large number of
communication standards which have been adopted within the production process. The ability to handle large amounts of data at the Edge is becoming
increasingly important as is the growing demand for networking and computing for vision and image recognition with no human intervention. Here Socionext has developed a number of solutions which simplify the development of Industry 4.0 equipment such as IP protection, functional safety and lifecycle management
Custom SoCs for Networking
Socionext has a long-standing history of state-of-the art Custom SoC for optical transport network applications, by providing the world’s first 100G, 200G and 400G chipsets to the market and revolutionising the telecom space. With the introduction of 5G the wide variety of existing know-how can be utilised for new developments enabling better solutions,
overcoming existing boundaries and pushing forward the 5G frontiers for new, broader network eco systems. 5G’s requirement for high data rates but also low latency with new feature sets has meant that transmitting data using discrete devices and modules in conventional, non-Custom SoC solutions will inevitably lead to a dramatic rise in power consumption. However, using Socionext intelligence the integration into a Custom SoC offers major benefits to system solutions since it enables optimised, complex designs with higher performance but lower power consumption and smaller footprints.
The Custom Soc approach offers customers the possibility to access their own custom- designed chip with the minimum of design effort and resource on their side, even if they have no in- house design expertise. Socionext, as the world’s second largest fabless custom SoC provider, is able to address the most complex of SoC design challenges, based on leading- edge semiconductor technology. With 40 years expertise and innovation from start to finish – you can count on them. Socionext
www.socionext.com
JUNE 2021 | ELECTRONICS TODAY 27
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50
