Posted: 10/19/98

Content-addressable memory (CAM) provider NetLogic Microsystems Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) has expanded into the cores business, offering two CAM core families to ASIC and other companies designing systems-on-silicon for networking applications. The new division, headed by industry veteran Al Kwok, licenses binary and ternary CAM cores in hard format and offers core customization services. According to T.J. Mueller, director of marketing at NetLogic, the binary CAM core is capable of sustained searches of the entire memory array at a rate of 40 million searches per second, with zero cycle latency. As such, it is well suited for the high-performance networking market. The ternary CAM allows users to mask an entry on a per-bit basis, suiting it for applications where subnet masking and longest-prefix match searches are used in classless interdomain routing.

Kwok, who is vice president of business development at NetLogic, said that in addition to offering the cores, the company will also offer customization services. "We will use these cores to leverage strategic partnership developments with customers moving into system-on-chip design," he said. "We will provide licensees with customization services and make the cores reusable for their future projects."

Mueller said the cores will also allow NetLogic to target other markets beyond networking. "Based on extensive customer input, we found there was interest in CAMs we are not supplying, both depth-wise and width-wise," he said. "So we felt that we could expand into other markets. Our ternary core, for example, could be used for applications other than networking, like hard-disk-drive compression." Kwok said NetLogic plans on eventually offering compilable versions of its cores.

Xilinx Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) has announced that seven new products are available from its AllianceCORE partner CAST Inc. Among them are serial-communications and microprocessor-peripheral cores targeting PC and embedded applications such as medical instrumentation, industrial control, aerospace, defense and communications systems.

According to the companies, the new cores are functional replacements for common functions, many of which are no longer available as discrete solutions. They can be used to create the beginning of an embedded-systems design kit, providing essential building blocks in a proven, easy-to-reuse form.

The cores include the C16450 UART, C16550 UART with FIFOs, C_UART compact UART, C6850 asynchronous communications interface adapter, C8255A peripheral interface, C8259A programmable interrupt controller and C2901 bit-slice unit.

All cores support the Xilinx XC4000XL and Spartan FPGA families. The C_UART, C6850, C8255A and C16450 also support the XC9500 and new XC9500XL CPLD families. License fees for the Xilinx net-list versions of each core range from $1,500 to $8,500.

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