Sondrel wins Queen’s Award for Enterprise

The design methodology, named Neon, is structured enough to enable project costs to be estimated prior to start and for projects to be delivered on time and on budget, yet is flexible enough to cope with multiple changes in design functionality. Comments Sondrel’s CEO, Graham Curren: “Most methodologies heavily restrict flexibility or are wildly inaccurate in estimating design time and costs.”



Importantly, Neon enables Sondrel to provide fixed price quotations, rather than time and materials based pricing. The company believes that it is the only physical implementation IC design company to take this approach – one which customers find very attractive as they have complete visibility upfront of the design cost.



Sondrel’s software environment, Helium, uses third party tools from leading vendors such as Synopsys, Magma and Mentor Graphics to perform fundamental tasks, yet it is independent of any single software vendor. This allows the company to switch quickly between different software solutions to achieve the best result. Helium also allows for the inclusion of a wide set of design and debug point tools, in addition to the design flow management, an example being those from Apache Design Solutions which are necessary to verify the power distribution of 65nm and 45nm projects. Adds Curren: “We are not aware of other design environments that enable the design team to do this, and yet these tools are vital in ensuring an efficient project implementation.” He concludes: “The Queen’s Award is a wonderful recognition of the acceptance our solutions have found with some of the world’s top-ranked semiconductor makers.”