23 December 2005

Startup Silistix Aims To Reduce Power & Design Efforts

Silistix, a venture-funded spin-out of the University of Manchester in the UK, is developing EDA tools and libraries to allow designers to more efficiently generate interconnect logic to communicate between intellectual property (IP) blocks in system-on-a-chip (SoC) platforms.

The company’s CHAIN solution provides power-dissipation and design productivity improvements over traditional on-chip bus architectures, the company said.

“CHAIN networks represent a new way of looking at on-chip interconnect that eliminates many of the problems associated with traditional global bus architectures controlled by high-speed clocks,” said David Fritz, vice president of marketing at Silistix. “Designers can also use Silistix provided adaptors to interface existing synchronous IP blocks to CHAIN networks thereby leveraging existing design work.”

The CHAIN interconnect fabric generated by Silistix’ design and synthesis tool suite, CHAINworks, is a self-timed, packet-based interconnect network that manages data flow between IP cores on a chip without being dependent on the edges of a system clock. This results in lower power dissipation since power is dictated by traffic load and not by a fixed clock rate. Clock domains in the CHAIN fabric do not have to be dependent on a system clock and the interconnect fabric can be tuned for specific throughput, area and power targets.

CHAINworks fits within existing EDA design flows, and the synthesized CHAIN interconnect fabric supports multiple protocols including AHB, APB, and AXI, used by ARM, enabling existing IP blocks to be used without modification.

The Silistix CHAIN solution targets OEMs, ODMs and fabless semiconductor companies who are developing products for power-sensitive markets such as cellular handsets, portable multimedia devices and smart cards, as well as for companies who are developing SoCs for complex applications such as HDTVs, set-top boxes, network security devices and SAN/NAS (Storage Area Network/Network Attached Storage) devices.