Satish Bagalkotkar, co-founder, president and CEO of Synapse

Co-founder, president and CEO Satish Bagalkotkar discusses how the company tackles engineering complexities in evolving SoC designs.

Addressing the growing SoC complexity from smaller nodes, Synapse Design helps deal with engineering challenges by providing hardware, application management and embedded services to semiconductor and system companies.

The Silicon Valley–based maker’s hardware services include system analysis, design, verification, physical design and chip testing. In application management, its scope encompasses mobile apps, on-chip controllers, power regulation and power management ICs. In embedded services, the company covers firmware, IP/cores, test drivers and manufacturing commands.

In an interview with Global Sources, co-founder, president and CEO Satish Bagalkotkar talks about what the SoC design house brings to the semiconductor sector and the electronics industry.

What is your unique value proposition to chipmakers and the electronics industry?

Synapse is a design services company with a global footprint, and specializes in the development of chips and related software. We provide engineering horsepower and give a head start to other businesses, not products. We see Synapse as a design factory operating in a knowledge capture system. We think we have introduced the automotive assembly concept to the chip industry.

Chipmakers usually produce six to eight SoC designs a year. On the other hand, we did 33 complex ones in the past 12 months. Customers give us specs and we do all the engineering work within an optimum time frame. Synapse builds prototypes, checks software and caters to chipmakers and electronics OEMs in an $8 billion to $10 billion business. It adopts a royalty-based profit sharing business model.

Traditional chipmakers take about nine months to design an SoC component, while Synapse does it in six. We therefore help get the product to market faster.

In the first six months of 2014, we have done 20 SoCs. These devices address applications in the automotive, multimedia, mobile, data storage, networking, and the Internet of Things markets.

What is the latest SoC undertaking at Synapse?

The 33rd SoC device is a 200sqmm die developed for the networking segment, and boasts more than 30 blocks, analog and mixed-signal content and a 1GHz high-speed interface.

Next up, Synapse has released its cloud hardware platform based on a Freescale T4240 network processor and natively running OpenStack Icehouse.

OpenStack is an open-source cloud computing software platform, which users manage through a Web-based dashboard, command-line tools or a RESTful API or representational state transfer application programming interface. OpenStack Icehouse is the ninth release and has nearly 350 new features to support software development, data management and application infrastructure at scale.

Synapse’s cloud hardware platform is a configurable design targeted at medium- to high-performance appliances for the storage and computing markets.

The company’s SoC expertise and its cloud platform are relevant to all three areas of the cloud: computing, storage and networking.

Robust SoC designs can help reduce power in data centers while maintaining or even increasing computing capability, and thus can help bring down the overall cost of ownership.

Can you provide more details on how Synapse drives its SoC design services business and on the company’s customers?

Synapse calls itself an SoC design R&D incubator and a supplier of science, technology, engineering and mathematics tools for enabling the SoC development. It also provides machine-to-machine interface for enabling the Internet of Things products and biometrics systems for iris recognition.

Synapse’s customers include chipmakers Broadcom, STMicroelectronics and TI, mobile OEMs Nokia and Samsung, networking gear suppliers Cisco and Juniper. In the storage sector, there are IBM and Hitachi.

In over 30 percent of the tape-outs during the 12-month period, Synapse delivered complete turnkey services from RTL to GDSII stage. In 40 percent of these, the company handled more than 50 percent of the design implementation. In the final 30 percent of design projects, it provided customers with additional resources allowing them to expand resources for pressing projects.

Please give us brief information on the company and its key design locations.

Synapse was founded in 2003 and has its headquarters in the Silicon Valley. The company has over 700 employees. It maintains design centers across the world, serving customers locally from offices in the US, Europe, mainland China, India and Taiwan.

Synapse engineers boast SoC expertise in areas such as analog and mixed-signal content, advanced process nodes including FinFET, hardening Arm cores for power-performance-area advantage, and embedded software including domain-specific ones.