EMBEDDED
Intelligence gathering chips at the Edge
Piyush Singh, Senior Staff Engineer in Systems Architecture at Sondrel discusses how Sondrel’s SFA 100 IP platform enables IoT ASIC solutions to be designed faster
our fingertips. The capacity to sense vast volumes of data and send it to the cloud is propelling IoT applications such as smart homes, industrial IoT, linked vehicles, smart cities, wearable infotainment, and wearable fitness/health forward. Innovations are key to driving growth in IoT, including interoperable connectivity, securing vulnerable data, increasing the energy efficiency of battery-powered devices, and improving intelligent human interface technology through touch, voice, image and sensor data. In addition, the ability to process advanced sensor algorithms and operate on this data securely, efficiently, and intelligently continues to increase the value of health,
T
he Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of intelligent devices that are available at
fitness, and infotainment devices that can be wearable, as well as machine-to-machine applications such as smart devices, measurement, secure access, and industrial automation. The market needs IoT designs that have
built in powerful compute capabilities to provide At the Edge solutions. The Sondrel SFA 100 is an IP platform that is specifically designed to provide a fast way to create these solutions by the extensive re-use of IP blocks within the pre-defined platform. The SFA 100 is a reference architecture for IoT comprising documentation, best practices, methodology guidance, Virtual Prototype, Synthesisable RTL, Verification IP and Testbenches to help build and integrate custom IoT SoCs quickly to reduce design costs.
Through hundreds of customer engagements, Sondrel has found commonalities in IoT SoC architectures, driven by market trends and needs to support Edge Processing in all sorts of environments. Furthermore, Sondrel has encapsulated all these learnings into one holistic, off-the-shelf framework known as the Scalable Architecture Framework (SAF). As a result, most of the work for a potential new SoC requires only minimal customisation and verification effort to achieve RTL freeze. The SFA 100 is one of several realisations of an IP platform architected using the SAF to suit a specific application area. The SFA 100 makes it possible to tape out an
SoC with substantially reduced effort. The bulk of the work in design and verification has been done up-front as part of the platform development. As such, the reduced time to market is a result of improved efficiencies in the following four areas:
1. Product: A set of new near-term processes and guides, which enable Sondrel to deliver IoT SoC projects faster
2. People: Methodology documents, virtual platform, reference code and verification test benches for technical and non- technical stakeholders to familiarise with the platform
Figure 1 : Sondrel SFA 100 Platform 44 SEPTEMBER 2021 | ELECTRONICS TODAY
3. Processes: Well defined project management processes and flows. Definition of standard practices, requirements capture and tracking as well as architectural and implementation specifications. The effort required to arrive at a specification for any potential project is significantly reduced. Definition of standard practices, requirements capture and tracking as well as architectural and implementation specifications.
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