Company Overview

To keep pace with market demand for more performance and functionality in electronic products like mobile phones, digital cameras, computers and digital televisions, manufacturers pack billions of transistors onto a single chip.  This massive integration involving many different functions makes communication among the functions on the chip (commonly called simply IP blocks or system components), such as memory, processors and Input / Output functions, extremely difficult. Instead of exchanging data the old-fashioned way ─ via shared wire busses ─ these highly complex devices, called Systems-on-Chip (SoCs), must exchange data using a network as a sub-system for managing the information traffic.  The data communications concepts enabling this are the same ones used in widely-adopted computer networking systems. Silistix has innovated on these proven techniques and miniaturizes them to manage on-chip communications. Hence, these sub-systems are known as Networks-on-Chip (or NoCs).  

Silistix provides NoC solutions consisting of tools and IP to designers of chips powering the latest multi-function consumer electronics products. Manufacturers of these complex chips include companies like Intel, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell, NEC Electronics and Toshiba.  In addition to managing chip complexity by generating the optimal NoC topology for the customer’s design, the Silistix CHAIN™ works tool suite delivers shorter and more predictable development cycles through proven integration with popular chip design tools, support for the common industry-standard interface protocols for on-chip IP, and utilization of the latest semiconductor process technologies. 

Silistix is a venture-funded company that was spun-out of the University of Manchester, UK.
The University of Manchester Computer Science Department has spun-out a number of successful start-ups including Transitive Technologies, whom IBM announced plans to acquire in November 2008.