Sandgate Technologies was founded in 1996 by 3 individuals who have worked together since 1983 in the network and computing domains. Adrian Port, Jon Wells, and Chad Spackman were early pioneers in ethernet and later in ATM and have experience in mass production of board and box level networking products. Sandgate began by developing full custom digital and analog IP blocks specific to customer ASIC requests. These IP blocks spanned the gamut from RAMs, CAMs, and register files, to high speed DACs, OP-AMPs, and precision bandgap voltage references. Sandgate designed and marketed a Dynamic RAM compiler capable of producing a custom dynamic memory core instance-able in planar CMOS silicon without the need for custom silicon processing Techniques.
In 1999 Sandgate was contracted by Lucent Technologies to design a complete 1 gigabit/s TCP-IP offload engine (TOE). A proprietary Hardware Description Language (HDL) was designed and leveraged to produce the IP. The IP and the language compiler were licensed to Intel corporation through Lucent Technologies.
In 2004 Sandgate started another company called Cebatech, who’s mission was to create a 10 Gbps TOE, this time using the C language as the HDL. Once again a language compiler was designed, and leveraged by software developers trained in the ways and means of hardware, to design the TOE chip. In 2008 Cebatech developed gzip compression cores in both C and Verilog. Cebatech (by then Altior) was acquired by Exar in 2011.
In 2011 Sandgate pursued development of high speed deflate/inflate compression IP. A first customer was Exar corporation. The blocks are written in System Verilog and are currently available through CAST. The IP supports the ZLIB and Gzip standards and can support single and multiple data streams in excess of 100Gbps.
The engineers at Sandgate were contracted to build a 750GH/s SHA chip for bitcoin mining in June of 2013. The chip taped out 2 months later and was proven to be 100% functional in late November of 2013. The design was realized in TSMC’s 28nm process and represents one of the most rapid designs and tapeouts Sandgate has ever accomplished. The device was powered by a 600 amp, .65 volt power supply, also designed by Sandgate.
In 2014 Sandgate re-commited itself to compression IP and joined forces with CAST Inc. to market the IP.
In late 2015, Sandgate and Superion Technology Group, Inc. forged a licensing agreement. Superion Technology is an ASIC, FPGA and Embedded design company with deep roots in ASIC design and verification in high-end networking and supercomputing domains. The marketing partnership with CAST Inc. remains in place.