Ineda Systems: Enabling IoT Revolution

Ineda Systems is a startup developing low power SoCs for use in both consumer and enterprise applications. The company provides innovative and differentiated platforms for IoT and Wearable applications with multiple connectivity options, based on patented I/O virtualization and hierarchical computing technologies.

Ineda’s platform ensures the secure execution of system and user data. It secures the communication path, for the hardware resources and firmware.

Technology Offered

I/O VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGY- In computing systems, virtualization is a technology that is generally implemented to meet the growing demands of user applications. Virtualization allows a platform to run multiple operating systems and applications at the separate partitions of SoCs., thus allowing a computing system to function as multiple “virtual” systems. In addition, each of the virtual systems may be isolated from each other and can function independently.

Ineda’s I/O Virtualization technology enables seamless sharing of peripherals such as Display, SD, NAND, Audio, video etc., among the two or more heterogeneous CPU and OS.

The Peripheral virtualization in Ineda’s SoCs is achieved through a combination of customized hardware and software and is specific to each peripheral.

POWER MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES- Ineda’s SoCs are designed for power-sensitive wearable and IoT applications. Typical wearable/IoT applications require running high-end operating systems such as Android or Linux in a power-effcient manner. There are various design techniques implemented in the Ineda’s SoCs that bring the overall power consumption down to 1/10th of typical power consumed by a BIG-little implementation of application processors.

Key features of power management system:

• Capability to Turn-On / Turn-Off SoC Core power rails
• Controlling the shut-down and power-on sequences (including system reset sequence)
• Sensor Sub-system Isolation from rest of the core
• Always-On Sensor IO Pads for un-interrupted usage
• Sensor On/Off Island power gating
• Dynamic frequency scaling
• Coarse grain clock gating for various modules
• “Halt” instruction clock gating for lowest CPU core

ALWAYS-ON SENSING- Many of the advanced features in Wearable and Mobile platforms like context-aware, environment-aware, or location-aware rely on growing number of ‘always-on’ sensors. The application and demands for extremely low-power ‘always-on’ sensor technology is going to continue to increase in future.

Indea’s family of SoCs delivers one of industry’s lowest power solution for always-on sensing. It uses a patented IP, called Policy Manager to sense and monitor data continuously from a variety of sensors while keeping the main CPU in deep sleep state. Once configured, the Policy Manager handles sensing, monitoring and conditioning of sensor data allowing the main CPU to reside in lowest power state. Combined with HCA, the Policy Manager delivers extreme low power continuous sensing solution enabling a new level of Wearable and IoT “ambient intelligence”.

MULTI-PROCESSOR COMMUNICATION- Ineda’s family of SoCs provides a secure and highly effcient inter-processor communication infrastructure using CPU Link services. The CPU Link is specifically designed to deliver low latency and low overhead communication between processors with diverse performance and memory resources. It uses fast interrupt mechanism to implement low latency for short messages and synchronization. It utilizes shared memory to achieve low overhead (aka “zero-copy”) so data passes by reference rather than physically being copies. Since resources and peripherals are shared between multiple processors, a lightweight semaphore mechanism allows implementation of synchronization primitives to surround critical sections of code and ensure there is no resource contention.

Knowing the Leaders

Balaji Kanigicherla, Founder & CEO – Balaji founded Ineda Systems and serves as Chief Executive Officer. Prior to his current role, he held the role of CTO & head of engineering to build a 100+ strong R&D team and led the development of foundation IO-V technology and industry first hierarchical computing architecture. Before Ineda, he was at AMD where he was responsible for management of 500+ engineer organization and was also program executive for their low power fusion SOC. Prior to AMD, he worked at Conexant Systems as a Senior Director managing their Set-Top-Box and Imaging/PC Media silicon engineering teams. He also worked in technical/management roles at Silicon Valley startups Ikanos & Velio and was a key member of their industry first networking/communication products. Earlier in his career, he was associated with Intel towards their x86 CPU and mobile chip-set engineering product development. He has filed for 20+ patents till date and played the role of a technical advisor for few Silicon Valley startups. He has a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University.

Ramkumar Subramanian, VP of Business and Corporate Development – Ram is responsible for corporate development and business development. Prior to Ineda, he was at AMD where he was running their international business strategy. He was also Regional VP of India and SAARC from 2008 to 2010 where he ran AMD’s Sales & Marketing and grew AMD’s business in that region in spite of a significant worldwide economic crash in 2008. Before that he was Director of Corp Dev at AMD where he was part of the team that created Global Foundries, acquired ATI, partner with Angstrem (Russia) etc. Prior to that he was Director of Corp Strategy at AMD where he helped AMD China grow from $70M to $1B in revenues in 3 years. He also helped launch AMD’s personal systems group products in Brazil. He began his career as a semiconductor process engineer. He has more than 200 patents to his name. He has a PhD in Chemical Eng. From Michigan State University and an MBA from Duke University.

Platform Offered

TRUSTED ENVIRONMENT- Ineda’s platform supports a variety of security features to enable the best-in-class security for Wearable and IoT devices. Ineda’s platform ensures the secure execution of system and user data. It secures the communication path, for the hardware resources, firmware and over the air upgrades.

HIERARCHICAL COMPUTING- IoT device needs to perform smart sensing and contextual processing by consuming lowest possible power. Ineda’s SoCs based on the Hierarchical computing architecture and patented IO virtualization technology aimed at performing complex tasks with efficient sharing of I/Os

LOW POWER MANAGEMENT- Ineda’s SoC’s has a versatile state machine called Policy manager resides on Always-On island that wakes up the rest of the on-chip resources based on configurable events. The overall power consumption of Ineda’s platform is 1/10th of the comparable MCU and MPU systems.

CONNECTIVITY AND CLOUD- Ineda’s platform provides end-to-end solution for IoT and wearable applications. Various connectivity stacks such as Wi-Fi, ZigBee, BLE, 802.15.4, 6LoWPAN, Thread and cloud APIs are available for easy integration and faster time to market.

“We provide innovative and differentiated platforms for IoT and Wearable applications with multiple connectivity options.”