Posted: 7/6/98
Cast spins three soft cores; Pivotal, Chartered in deal
Core provider Cast Inc. has unveiled three new VHDL soft cores: the Soft Decision Viterbi, the C49402 synthesizable VHDL core and the C6845 CRT controller.
The Soft Decision Viterbi core, which Cast created with development partner Hantro Products Oy (Oulu, Finland), targets error correction and repair of wireless communications and consumer-electronics products.
According to Cast, the core uses a forward-error-correction technique that employs convolutional encoding to improve the error rate performance.
Unlike the Hard Decision Viterbi, which uses hammering distances, the Soft Decision Viterbi uses a Euclidian metric to calculate distances, meaning that every channel bit is expressed by several levels and that the distance of the sample from the right level is the branch metric.
Cast also announced the C49402 synthesizable VHDL core, which it created with development partner Radcore Inc.
According to Cast, the new core is based on the AMD 2901 and is the functional equivalent of four 4-bit 2901 devices. It has a 16-bit cascadable ALU slice containing an expanded instruction set and provisions for a 64-element register file, resembling the original 49C402 implementation by IDT. It also contains carry look-ahead logic based on the AMD2902 look-ahead generator.
Cast said the C49402 can be used in any application that requires logical or arithmetic operations. It is instruction-set-compatible with both the IDT and Cypress 49C402 implementations. It can be provided with triple modular redundancy (TMR) for radiation-hardened applications.
The C6845 CRT Controller core, which Cast created with development partner Digital Blocks, is targeted at embedded -system designers who need character- and bit-mapped CRT display functions.
Cast said the core works with Motorola's MC6845 CRT controller. Designers implementing the core for alphanumeric display apps can synthesize it into Altera and Xilinx FPGAs with on-chip character clock of 49 MHz.
For bit-mapped graphics display applications, according to Cast, the core can work for off-chip pixel clock rates-up to 441 MHz for character display formats of 80 x 24 and character maps of 99 pixels.
The Soft Viterbi core includes block-level documentation with test benches, synthesizable source code and scripts for synthesis and simulations. The 49402 comes with synthesizable code, a test bench, test vectors and documentation. The C6845 CRT controller comes with a test bench, golden test vectors, a synthesis script and documentation.
Pivotal Technologies, LLC and Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing (Singapore) have signed a joint marketing agreement that lets the companies co-market analog and mixed-signal cores developed by Pivotal for Chartered's foundry processes.
According to the companies, Pivotal will provide Chartered's customers with its OptiMix line of analog and mixed-signal components, such as phase-locked loops, A/D and D/A converters, crystal oscillators, charge pumps and other analog interface elements.
Edited by Michael Santarini.
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