soc-design
(6)
Sonics and the Art of Making Chips Wait Less
The processor gets the applause. Sonics built the connections that kept it supplied, then taught idle circuits to switch off. Facebook bought the team and technology in 2019.
The Five-Minute Check That Changed the Chip Schedule
A chip team cannot fix a bug it has not seen. Real Intent’s wager is that the useful warning is the one engineers can afford to read today, while the design is still easy to change.
Arteris Put a Tiny Internet Inside the Chip - Then Turned the Traffic Jam Into a Business
Modern chips are crowded cities, and the roads now matter as much as the buildings. Arteris turned that traffic problem into a licensing business used across more than 4 billion chips and chiplets - while learning that connectivity alone was no longer enough.
Movellus Inc.
Movellus is a San Jose semiconductor IP company that builds the invisible plumbing of advanced chips - the clocks, sensors, droop-response systems and on-die voltage regulators that keep high-performance silicon running fast without melting or missing a beat. Its flagship Aeonic platform reimagines traditional analog blocks as synthesizable, digital IP that can be dropped into an SoC design and ported across process nodes from 40nm down to TSMC 3nm. Founded in 2014 out of University of Michigan research, the company sells to teams building everything from ultra-low-power edge-AI devices to cloud datacenter and AI accelerators, and raised a $23M Series B in 2022.
Synopsys Inc
Synopsys is the quiet giant behind the world's chips. Its electronic design automation (EDA) software, semiconductor IP, and AI-driven design tools are used to design and verify nearly every advanced silicon chip on the planet - from smartphone processors to AI accelerators. Founded in 1986 by Aart de Geus and led today by CEO Sassine Ghazi, the Sunnyvale company turned the impossibly hard task of laying out billions of transistors into a software problem, and now layers AI on top of it. Its 2025 acquisition of simulation leader Ansys pushed it deeper into multiphysics and systems engineering.
GSME
GSME (Global Semiconductor Microelectronics) is a San Jose-based semiconductor solutions company offering customized silicon, RF and power management IC design, multi-project wafer services, and turnkey chip manufacturing for fabless customers building GPUs, CPUs, IoT and wireless products.