Sondrel Doubles Capacity & Extends Services in Morocco

Sondrel has announced the expansion of its world class design centre facilities in Morocco. The growth and consolidation of the front end team has extended its services to include design & verification for ASICs, and now FPGA designs. These new capabilities, coupled to the continued expansion of the physical design team has resulted in the necessity to invest in its infrastructure, creating additional client rooms.

Sondrel now has three design centres in Europe, providing a secure environment for each project engagement. A client room is an IS027001 compliant room (camera position, door interlock and access rules) dedicated to a particular customer and used only by that customer for the duration of the contract.

Graham Curren, Sondrel CEO commented, ‘2016 saw the growth and consolidation of our engineering team in Rabat. I have been delighted by the expertise and enthusiasm shown by the new team, and this is enabling the rapid expansion of the group and the service offerings. The access our clients now have to engineering teams at different cost points, and all in the GMT or EU time-zone has proved to be a compelling technical and commercial proposition’

The current demand for front end design resources continues to be a challenge within the industry. Paul Martin, Sondrel Director of Engineering for Front End Design, has been tasked with building the team. The numbers reflect his success, with the team now equal in number to that of the Sondrel Physical Implementation engineers, currently the largest Back End team in Europe.

‘As the team has expanded’, Paul Martin explained, ‘we have added to the breadth of expertise. The large scale automotive and aerospace sectors in Morocco have translated into a good resource pool of well qualified FGPA and ASIC engineers. From an initial team of ASIC functional verification engineers we have added RTL design expertise and now FPGA design and verification capabilities. The former ST engineers remain at the core of the team. With experienced leadership, having worked on all aspects of SoC and mixed signal ASIC design including architecture, SW development, RTL design and functional verification, they are well placed to manage project engagements in our Rabat design centre.