Two Major Enterprise Solid State Disk (SSD) Vendors License Arteris FlexNoC Interconnect IP

by Kurt Shuler, On Feb 18, 2015

CAMPBELL, California and PISA, Italy — February 17, 2015 — Arteris Inc., the inventor and only supplier of silicon-proven commercial network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect IP solutions, and YOGITECH S.p.A., the leader in functional safety verification tooling and solutions, today announced a strategic partnership to help semiconductor design teams develop automotive and industrial systems-on-chip (SoCs) more effectively. The two industry-leading companies are teaming up to integrate their products to enable SoC vendors to more easily implement and assess functional safety requirements in complex chips.

The fruits of this YOGITECH and Arteris partnership will help the automotive and semiconductor industries to more quickly implement in silicon the complex features required for autonomous driving systems.

Implementing functional safety features in silicon offers many advantages over software-only approaches by enabling less complexity, pre-characterized quality and more semiconductor vendor control over the system-wide functional safety feature implementations.

Yogitech logo
Silvano Motto, President and CEO, Arteris

New generation of enterprise SSD controllers to benefit from network-on-chip (NoC) data protection, high bandwidth PCI Express (PCIe)

CAMPBELL, California — February 18, 2015 — Arteris Inc., the inventor and only supplier of silicon-proven commercial network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect IP solutions, today announced that two of the world’s largest enterprise SSD vendors have licensed Arteris FlexNoC fabric IP for use as the communications backbone within their upcoming SSD controller SoCs.

The enterprise SSD market has quickly grown in sophistication and complexity, making it a perfect match for the use of Arteris FlexNoC interconnect IP. We are proud that these two leading companies have chosen Arteris to help them implement their own state-of-the-art SSD controllers in less time for less cost, taking advantage of FlexNoC’s unmatched data protection, QoS and SoC assembly features.

Arteris Ip logo
K. Charles Janac, President and CEO, Arteris

The enterprise SSD market is going through a shift where a number of innovative companies are bringing their controller chip design in-house rather than relying on third-party suppliers. A complicating factor is the high bandwidth requirements for moving large blocks of data very quickly, creating extreme routing congestion and timing closure issues. Arteris FlexNoC’s network-on-chip technology alleviates these back end bottlenecks by packetizing data and serializing its transmission over fewer wires than required with inferior fabric technologies. Using Arteris FlexNoC simultaneously shortens design schedules and shrinks die size, increasing the profitability potential for these enterprise SSD vendors.
In addition to the schedule and cost savings, Arteris FlexNoC has helped these companies by providing:

  • State-of-the-art on-chip data protection – Enterprise SSD controllers must protect data contents not only within processing units and memories, but also in all on-chip communications between them. Arteris FlexNoC IP’s error-code correcting (ECC) and parity data protection make it easy to set up, test and check the composition of on-chip data flows in real time. And it natively supports the ARM Cortex-R5 and Cortex-R7 processor ECC and parity data protection schemes. Additional data protection features such as redundancy / duplication and built-in system checking (BIST) are also available with the optional FlexNoC Resilience Package.
  • High bandwidth, low latency for PCIe – Enterprise SSD controllers have unique requirements for extremely high bandwidth and low latency block transfers to make the most efficient use of on-chip PCIe controllers. Arteris FlexNoC has the most quality-of-service (QoS) configuration options of any commercially available fabric IP, allowing optimal performance for these unique requirements.
  • Fastest possible SoC assembly – Using Arteris FlexNoC is the fastest way for these companies to assemble highly sophisticated semiconductor systems. Built-in simulation and verification made it possible for these design teams to quickly validate engineering decisions, enabling them to make tailored controller solutions that perform better than previous merchant controllers.

“The enterprise SSD market has quickly grown in sophistication and complexity, making it a perfect match for the use of Arteris FlexNoC interconnect IP,” said K. Charles Janac, President and CEO of Arteris. “We are proud that these two leading companies have chosen Arteris to help them implement their own state-of-the-art SSD controllers in less time for less cost, taking advantage of FlexNoC’s unmatched data protection, QoS and SoC assembly features.”

About Arteris

Arteris, Inc. provides Network-on-Chip interconnect IP and tools to accelerate System-on-Chip semiconductor (SoC) assembly for a wide range of applications. Rapid semiconductor designer adoption by customers such as Samsung, Altera, and Texas Instruments has resulted in Arteris being the only semiconductor IP company to be ranked in the Inc. 500 and Deloitte Technology Fast 500 lists in 2012 and 2013. Customer results obtained by using the Arteris product line include lower power, higher performance, more efficient design reuse and faster SoC development, leading to lower development and production costs. More information can be found at www.arteris.com.

Arteris, FlexNoC and the Arteris logo are trademarks of Arteris. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners.