EE Times home

News
This Week's News

Profession
The Profession
Career Corner
Ask the Headhunter
Guide to Internet EE
Salary Survey

Columns
Contents
Wintel Watch
Letter from Europe
Institutional Memory
Nano Research Today
Dataport Online
Comm. Unplugged
Weaving Your Web
The Motley Fool

Features
Smart Technologies
Special Reports

Product Info
Product File

Fun & Games
Immortal Works
Game Power
Poems

Search

The cores support cycle-master operation and isochronous queue requests and can operate with an isolated PHY-Link bus. The FlexFire cores will be offered to Oki's ASIC customers designing computer and peripheral products, such as storage devices, printers, scanners, DVDs, camcorders and VCRs.

Mentor Graphics Corp. (Wilsonville, Ore.) has entered into an agreement to be the exclusive supplier of soft cores to Faraday Technology Corp. (Taiwan). Under terms of the partnership, Faraday will design ICs for customers using Mentor's Inventra Soft Cores and will also provide technical support for the cores. The companies hope the partnership will speed development of chips for consumer and multimedia electronics products.

Separately, Mentor and Express Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) have formed a partnership called CorExpress. In the agreement, Mentor will license its library of Inventra Soft Cores to the laser programmable gate array (LPGA) provider.

Chip Express will use its LPGA technology to create test chips from the cores, validating each core in silicon. Chip Express hopes its customers will use the cores and the firm's rapid-turnaround services to create system chips.

Emulex Corp. (Costa Mesa, Calif.) announced that it has licensed the CoreFrame Architecture from Palmchip Corp. (San Jose, Calif.) for use in high-performance system-on-chip designs.

With the relationship, Emulex said, it can accelerate the design of new ASIC devices for advanced networking products in conjunction with its ARM RISC processor-based network-access engines.

Palmchip bills the CoreFrame as an on-chip interconnect architecture, which combines cores with "plug-and-play" simplicity.

Programmable-logic vendor Xilinx Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) has announced a suite of cores that supports the company's new Spartan series FPGAs, which target high-volume, price-sensitive consumer applications such as personal computers, cable modems and set-top boxes.

The cores, offered by both Xilinx and its AllianceCore partners, include a UART, a 16-bit RISC processor, 16-bit and 16-tap symmetrical FIR filter, a Reed-Solomon encoder and a PCI interface.

According to the company, all of Xilinx's DSP LogiCore products support the new line of devices, and the LogiCore PCI interface will also be available by Q1 of this year.

Edited by Michael Santarini, with a contribution by Anthony Cataldo.