Sondrel has announced that it is now shipping finished chips to a US customer as part of a full turnkey contract of concept to silicon. The chips are accelerators for AI, which is one of Sondrel’s speciality areas as it requires high performance, ultra-complex custom designs on leading edge nodes.
“Selecting a turnkey supplier to handle a complete ASIC project is much more challenging than just selecting an ASIC design house,” explained Ollie Jones, Sondrel’s CEO. “There needs to be a high level of confidence and trust. Fortunately, we have an excellent reputation for designing ultra-complex custom chips that has been built up over the past twenty years and customers come to us for that service. As a result, customers know that we are detail-oriented and also want us to take care of all the many stages downstream in the complex supply chain, in addition to design.
“We invest time right at the initial engagement to ensure that the customer fully understands every aspect of the whole turnkey process and how we would handle it. With every such turnkey project, the customer will know that this will be a proper partnership with personal service, full transparency and regular dialogues at every stage, unlike some companies who expect the customer to adapt to the ways that they want to do things with very little customer interaction.”
A key example of Sondrel’s expertise in the supply chain was the critical question of packaging lead times. At the time when the project was being negotiated, packaging lead times were around 42 weeks, but Sondrel’s knowledge of the market trends and well-established contacts with its regular packaging companies meant that it was able to confidently offer packaging times for this project of 12 to 16 weeks at the relevant point in the project’s timeline. This is because Sondrel is managing the entire supply chain and therefore has a precise view of the timeline for every stage and can book packaging slots well in advance. “We were also able to identify the exact specialist packaging required as it had to have an ultra-low profile of only 2.5mm,” added Ollie Jones. “Knowing that a flip-chip CSP package would be required, we had already booked the time and the resources for this at the packaging company to ensure that the project was on schedule.”
