Intel acquires NetSpeed Systems to lower costs of chip design

Intel has acquired NetSpeed Systems for an undisclosed price. The big chip maker said the acquisition of San Jose, California-based NetSpeed Systems will help improve its tools for creating chip designs.

NetSpeed has highly configurable and synthesizable offerings that could help Intel more quickly and cost-effectively design, develop, and test new system-on-chips (SoCs), or all-in-one chips that put a full working system on a single piece of silicon.

The NetSpeed team is joining Intel’s Silicon Engineering Group (SEG), led by chip architect Jim Keller. NetSpeed cofounder and CEO Sundari Mitra will continue to lead her team as an Intel vice president reporting to Keller.

“Intel is designing more products with more specialized features than ever before, which is incredibly exciting for Intel architects and for our customers,” said Keller, senior vice president, in a statement. “The challenge is synthesizing a broader set of IP blocks for optimal performance while reining in design time and cost. NetSpeed’s proven network-on-chip technology addresses this challenge, and we’re excited to now have their IP and expertise in-house.”

NetSpeed Systems was founded in 2011, and it provides scalable, coherent, network-on-chip (NoC) intellectual property to SoC designers. NetSpeed’s NoC tool automates SoC front-end design and generates programmable, synthesizable high-performance and efficient interconnect fabrics.

“Intel has been a great customer of NetSpeed’s, and I’m thrilled to once again be joining the company,” said Mitra, who worked at Intel as a chip designer earlier in her career, in a statement. “Intel is world class at designing and optimizing the performance of custom silicon at scale. As part of Intel’s silicon engineering group, we’re excited to help invent new products that will be a foundation for computing’s future.”

Intel expects to honor NetSpeed’s existing customer contracts, but NetSpeed will become an internal asset going forward.

As SoCs grow more complex and as new fabrication processes explode the number of design rules, architects are increasingly utilizing front-end tools like NetSpeed’s to automate the design and validation process – saving time and money. NetSpeed’s technology helps architects estimate and optimize SoC performance in advance of manufacturing through a system-level approach, user-driven automation, and state-of-the-art algorithms.

Intel Capital was an investor in NetSpeed Systems.