Sondrel ships complete turnkey AI accelerator chip
UK design house Sondrel is shipping its first chip produced under a full turnkey contract of concept to silicon.
The AI accelerator chip was developed for a US customer on a leading edge node and is a step beyond the previous Sondrel ASIC design offering.
“Selecting a turnkey supplier to handle a complete ASIC project is much more challenging than just selecting an ASIC design house,” said Ollie Jones, CEO of Sondrel who took over six weeks ago.
“There needs to be a high level of confidence and trust. Fortunately, we have an excellent reputation for designing ultra-complex custom chips that has been built up over the past twenty years and customers come to us for that service. As a result, customers know that we are detail-oriented and also want us to take care of all the many stages downstream in the complex supply chain, in addition to design.
“We invest time right at the initial engagement to ensure that the customer fully understands every aspect of the whole turnkey process and how we would handle it. With every such turnkey project, the customer will know that this will be a proper partnership with personal service, full transparency and regular dialogues at every stage, unlike some companies who expect the customer to adapt to the ways that they want to do things with very little customer interaction.”
A key example of Sondrel’s expertise in the supply chain was the critical question of packaging lead times. At the time when the project was being negotiated, packaging lead times were around 42 weeks, but the company’s knowledge of the market trends and well-established contacts with its regular packaging companies meant that it was able to confidently offer packaging times for this project of 12 to 16 weeks at the relevant point in the project’s timeline.
As Sondrel managed the entire supply chain and had a precise view of the timeline for every stage, it could book packaging slots well in advance.
“We were also able to identify the exact specialist packaging required as it had to have an ultra-low profile of only 2.5mm,” added Jones. “Knowing that a flip-chip CSP package would be required, we had already booked the time and the resources for this at the packaging company to ensure that the project was on schedule.”
Sondrel is one of only a few global companies capable of designing and supplying the higher-spec chips built on the most advanced semiconductor technologies, selling into a range of hyper growth end markets such as high-performance computing, automotive, artificial intelligence, VR/AR, video analytics, image processing, mobile networking and data centres and has long established relationships with ARM, TSMC and Samsung.
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