Technology Review
A quick summary of tech and skillset
Hex Microchip designs, produces and programs SoCs. This section establishes a quick review for customers who are new to this world.
Please do not hesitate to get in touch for any additional information.
System-on-Chip (SoC)
SoCs typically consist of:
•Control Units: Microprocessors, MCU, DSP, GPU
•Memory Blocks: ROM, RAM, Flash Memory, and EEPROM
•Timing Units: Oscillators and PLLs
•External Interfaces: USB, MIPI-DSI, MIPI-CSI2, CAN, CAN FD, LVDS, Ethernet, FireWire, UART, PCIe, SPI, I2C, HDMI, DDR4, SD/eMMC, SATA, JTAG ...
•Analog Interfaces: ADC, DAC, SerDes ...
•Wireless Networking: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LoWPAN, NFC modules ...
SoC Design Flow
SoC design typically follows the design flow seen in the diagram. It involves (but not limited to) the following areas of expertise that HEX offers:
•RTL Design and Synthesis (Frontend)
•ASIC Physical Design (Backend)
•Analog-Mixed Signal IC Design
We have carried out multiple projects in the following technology nodes:
•5nm, 7nm, 22nm, 28nm, 40nm, 55nm, 65nm, 90nm, 130nm, 160nm, 180nm
•Bulk CMOS, FDSOI, GaN
•TSMC, UMC, GlobalFoundries, XFAB, SilTerra
Embedded Systems Development
An embedded system is a tailor-made combination of hardware/software for a dedicated purpose such as washing machines, mission-critical airborne guidance computers or safety-critical biomedical devices. These software/hardware products require additional attention with regards to their application field. We, as HEX Microchip, also design the embedded systems for our SoC products. HEX Microchip has many years of experience in:
•Event-driven hierarchical state machine structures
•Custom scheduler mechanisms
•C/C++, Assembly programming
•Custom bootloader applications
•Embedded linux applications
•DevOps – CI/CD models
•High-speed communication nodes
•Mission/safety critical software development
•Time-critical control loops
•Hardware abstraction layers
•System integration analysis
•Airworthiness checks
•Robotics design and mathematical modeling
•Ultra-low power applications
•Machine learning applications