UltraSoC, the leading provider of on-chip monitoring and analytics solutions for complex systems-on-chip (SoCs) today announced that it has joined the PRiME Programme. Funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the five-year PRiME program brings together leading academic institutions and industrial partners to help develop future embedded systems utilizing many-core processors, with sustainable energy consumption and high reliability.

UltraSoC takes on PRiME Associate membership, joining program participants including the University of Southampton, Imperial College London, University of Manchester and Newcastle University. These institutions bring to the program world-leading R&D expertise in low-power, highly-parallel, reconfigurable and dependable computing, and verified software design. Existing industrial partners include Altera, ARM, Freescale, Imagination Technologies and Microsoft Research.

UltraSoC’s technology addresses a burgeoning crisis in SoC development: today’s chips – and the software that runs on them – are so complex that it is increasingly difficult for engineers to understand how they will behave under all circumstances. By replacing the traditional piecemeal approach to SoC analysis with lightweight, efficient monitoring and analytics circuitry on the chip itself, UltraSoC enables a holistic approach that can not only spot problems in designs before they reach production, but also allows engineers to optimize their products for lower power consumption or better performance.

“We’re delighted to welcome UltraSoC to the program,” said Gerry Scott, PRiME’s Impact Manager. “UltraSoC’s IP products help engineers to address many of the problems inherent in many-core systems. These are exactly the challenges that PRiME was established to address: most importantly the over-arching problems of energy consumption, reliability and diminishing returns on raw processor performance.”

Rupert Baines, CEO of UltraSoC, commented: “We are very excited to be joining PRiME. The UK has been a hotbed of semiconductor industry expertise for many years now. Programs like PRiME bring together industry and academia and make a major contribution in the effort to keep us at the technological forefront.”