Design consultancy to double headcount

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Feb 3, 2004

After an exceptionally successful first year which saw back-end design consultancy Sondrel contribute to 16 ASIC designs, the company is planning to double its design team over the next 12 months.

After an exceptionally successful first year which saw back-end design consultancy Sondrel contribute to 16 ASIC designs, the company is planning to double its design team over the next 12 months.

The company, which has offices near Reading in the UK and Nice, France, is looking to take on another eight designers to cope with the demand for its services.

Comments founder CEO, Graham Curren: "16 designs in one year is a helluva lot.

Medium sized companies might look to complete 2-4 projects, and only the really big names, such as Infineon, TI, Motorola, Philips or ST would expect to tape out more than 15.

We are very pleased that the market has seen that we can deliver a cost effective route from RTL to GDSII, without customers having to invest in expensive tools and equally expensive and lengthy training programmes".

Sondrel is already establishing a "safe hands" reputation for handling tricky 90nm designs having worked on four European 90nm projects and on hierarchical designs with complexities in excess of 50 million transistors.

Curren and his ever-expanding team have worked on both sides of the fence - semiconductor design and EDA tools - so they bring a high level of understanding to any challenge.

So far the company has successfully worked on chips that are now being used in networking equipment, mobile phones and HDDs, featuring a high DSP content and, inevitably, many embedded ARM cores.

Comments Curren: "At 0.13 micron and 90nm you have to go back to first principles.

Noise and on-chip variations are yield killers.

This means that although our focus is at the back end, we must be involved at a very early stage, to ensure that the floorplanning and clocking are correct, and hence ensure that the project will be delivered on time and to specification".