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Posted: March 23, 1998

Building on its portfolio of synthesizable bus-interface cores, Sand Microelectronics Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) will unveil its first synthesizable IEEE 1394 cores this week at the IP98 Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. Sand said the 1394DC device-controller core and the 1394 CPHY digital cable-PHY core will let designers craft IEEE 1394 products with speeds up to 400 Mbits/second. The company will also show its Sand Designer ADVantage 1394 design tool kit, which includes the cores, a 1394 simulation model and design aids.

Sand's cores and models comply with the IEEE 1394 standard. Approximate gate counts are 15,000 for the 1394DC and 10,000 for the 1394 CPHY. The cores include Sand's RapidScript utility, which is said to enable fast, error-free core configuration to specific customer requirements.

The 1394DC core consists of a link layer and asynchronous and isochronous interfaces that are customizable using RapidScript. RapidScript is also used to customize the number of ports for the 1394 CPHY controller core.

Sand has been shipping its IEEE 1394 simulation model since April 1997. The cores and tool kit will be available next month in Verilog and VHDL.

A trio of engineers who were formerly with Pilkington Microelectronics Ltd. have formed a company, Systolix Ltd. (Warrington, England), to develop DSP cores based on systolic-array architectures. The company claims its P micro MA (Programmable Micro Multiply-accumulate Array) technology is cheaper to make than traditional DSP products.

The technology allows multiple instructions to be applied to multiple streams of data, said co-founder Gareth Jones, who is marketing director. Systolix has developed a family of processors using P micro MA, and the first licensed products based on it are expected in early 1999. Later next year, Systolix will introduce a range of its own products, Jones said.

Jones said Systolix has no silicon implementations but said, "We're talking to a number of partners about licensing. By choosing to pursue both routes, we see more stability."

Jones' co-founders at Systolix are Gordon Work, managing director, and Ian Dewhurst, technical director. The trio have received startup capital from a U.K. investment company, Investors in Industry, and from the Merseyside Special Investment Fund of venture-capital company Invotech.

Pilkington, best known for its development of digital and analog field-programmable gate-array architectures, was acquired by Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector in 1997.

Escalade Corp. (Santa Clara) and Palmchip Corp. (San Jose) have disclosed that Palmchip will offer its portfolio of cores with Escalade's DesignBook software. According to the companies, the solution will give designers a process for easily evaluating Palmchip's cores and CoreFrame on-chip architecture.

Escalade said the DesignBook protects the value of the core throughout the evaluation because of its flexible disclosure and protection mechanisms.

Edited by Michael Santarini, with a contribution by Peter Clarke.