The latest addition to Sondrel’s family of IP platforms is a semi-custom SoC design to which a customer’s IP is added to create a bespoke solution for high performance data processing.
Each SFA 300 reference design has four CPU clusters and several SFA 300s can be ganged together and synchronised via its PCIe interface to create an even more powerful solution.
There is also the option for integrating accelerators and/or custom logic to further increase performance and minimise power requirements.
The SFA 300 enables fast, tailor-made solutions to be created for processing-intense applications such as 8K video, AI, facial recognition for surveillance, smart factories, blockchain servers and medical data analysis.
“An ASIC with four CPU clusters is complex to design,” explained Rowan Naylor, a Principal Engineering Consultant at Sondrel. “Moving data around the chip without bottlenecks needs a Network on Chip, a multi-width data path, internal RAM scaled and distributed across the design for optimal performance, and data conflict arbitration. Plus, there are the data security aspects in the Arm-based security subsystem such as activity/intrusion detection. All this is already in the SFA 300 IP platform, so all that has to be done is integrating in the customer’s IP which cuts down the design time and costs by up to 30%.”