Siemens acquires UltraSoC to promote SOC full life cycle management design

Siemens has signed an agreement to acquire UltraSoC Technologies Ltd., headquartered in Cambridge, UK. UltraSoC is a monitoring and analysis solution provider that provides intelligent monitoring, information security and functional safety functions for the core hardware of system-on-chip (SoC). Siemens plans to integrate UltraSoC's technology into the Xcelerator solution portfolio as part of Mentor's Tessent™ software product suite. The addition of UltraSoC will help Siemens achieve a unified, data-driven infrastructure to further improve product quality, safety and information security, and create a more complete solution to help semiconductor industry customers overcome industry pain points including manufacturing defects, software and hardware vulnerabilities, early equipment failures and losses, functional safety, and malicious attacks.

“Siemens’ acquisition of UltraSoC means our customers can now not only design for test, but also have access to a complete solution for ‘design for lifecycle management’ of their SoCs, including functional safety, security and optimization,” said Brady Benware, vice president of Siemens Digital Industries Software and general manager of the Tessent product family. “By leveraging augmented design to monitor, mitigate and eliminate risk throughout the SoC lifecycle, customers can now significantly improve time to value, product quality and safety, and profitability. UltraSoC’s fast-growing business and customer potential will add to Tessent’s strengths as a Siemens company, creating a truly unique offering in the market.”

UltraSoC has pioneered the embedding of monitoring hardware into complex system-level chips, enabling full-scale analysis capabilities "from chip design to system application site", thereby accelerating chip design, optimizing product performance, and enabling equipment to operate according to design goals to ensure functional safety and information security. Tessent is a market leader in system-level chip design for test (DFT) solutions and has established advantages in the field of automotive functional safety through its Tessent safety ecosystem. These two highly complementary product portfolios lay the foundation for creating a complete solution that can cover semiconductor product design and production, functional safety, information security, and product field function optimization.

The strong combination of Siemens and UltraSoC technology will empower semiconductor products throughout the entire product life cycle, supporting system-level chip architecture, electrical and functional features. In addition, because UltraSoC provides actual equipment monitoring capabilities, it can also support Siemens' comprehensive digital twin solution.

“This acquisition will enable UltraSoC to achieve its vision on a larger scale, leveraging Siemens’ strong team, assets, industry expertise and network,” said Rupert Baines, CEO of UltraSoC. “As part of a global technology company, UltraSoC can now accelerate R&D and leverage a wider range of go-to-market resources and a massive global infrastructure to better serve our customers. From the outset, it was clear that UltraSoC and Siemens share the same vision for how technology companies can achieve end-to-end business transformation from design conception to field deployment, and we are delighted to join the Siemens family.”

UltraSoC's products are widely used in the automotive, high-performance computing, storage and semiconductor industries. The company was recently selected for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon (AISS) program and is a member of the Secure-CAV Alliance, a collaborative project aimed at improving the safety and security of future connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). Siemens' acquisition of UltraSoC is scheduled to be completed in the fourth quarter of Siemens' 2020 fiscal year. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Siemens Digital Industrial Software is committed to driving the transformation of digital enterprises to achieve engineering, manufacturing and electronic design that can meet future needs. The Siemens Xcelerator solution portfolio can help companies of all sizes create and make full use of digital twin technology, bringing new insights, opportunities and automation levels to organizations to promote innovation.