Reflections on 10 Years as a Commercial On-Chip Interconnect Provider

Sonics was founded in 1996, just as the term "System on a Chip" began to enter the common semiconductor vernacular. The author identified the wide variety of heterogeneous components that would need to cooperate to satisfy embedded consumer and communications applications as a key challenge in completing SoC designs. Networking and telecommunications technologies seemed to offer the required abstraction, decoupling, and hard real-time performance guarantees that conventional computing approaches lacked. By early 1997, Sonics had become a licensor of active interconnect technology focused on SoC applications.