Posted: May 11, 1998

Building on the increased momentum in the semiconductor industry to implement both microprocessor and DSP functions on a single chip, VLSI Technology Inc. has added performance enhancements to its versions of the ARM7 and Oak DSP cores and has announced initial availability of the ARM9TD core.

With the ARM7TDMI, VLSI Technology reduced the ARM7 core's power dissipation as well as ratchet up its performance. The core operates at 90 Mips in 0.25-micron process technology. It provides full embedded debug and supports both the 32-bit ARM and the 16-bit Thumb instruction sets.

The company's Oak+, meanwhile, is an enhanced Oak DSP core operating at 130 Mips. It is implemented in 0.25-micron technology and features access to both X and Y data buses off core, letting designers balance data loads across both buses to increase performance and reduce power dissipation while maintaining full binary compatibility.

VLSI Technology also announced that it will release the VLSI ARM9TD, with performance migration to 180 Mips, by the fourth quarter. The core features a five-stage pipeline and Harvard bus architecture, has full embedded debug capabilities, and supports both the 32-bit ARM and the 16-bit Thumb instruction sets.

Startup library vendorVirtual Silicon Technology Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) announced it has received $7 million in new funding from several investors.

Two of the largest investors are venture-capital companies Information Technology Ventures (Menlo Park, Calif.) and Walden International Investment Group (San Francisco). The company also received venture funding from Band of Angels investment-club members Jack Balletto and Jack Carsten.

The startup also announced that Sam Lee of Information Technology Ventures and Som Das of Walden have joined its board of directors. Bernard Aronson, president and chief executive officer of FPGA-synthesis vendor Synplicity Inc., joined the board in January.

The company, staffed primarily by former employees and developers of Compass Design Automation's Libraries Group, offers libraries, physical-design components and services for integrated circuits in 0.25- and 0.18-micron process technologies.

Integrated-circuit design-services company Seva Technologies (Fremont, Calif.) now offers intellectual-property evaluation services aimed at helping designers determine the most appropriate model for a given design project. The offering complements Seva's other evaluation services, for hardware and software benchmarking and for tool and methodology assessment.

The design house has several years of experience in IC design and tool benchmarking. It also has experience in implementing PCI, Universal Serial Bus, 1394 Firewire and MPEG cores.

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