ANAHEIM, Calif. — Target Compiler Technologies, a design tools spinoff of Belgian research institute IMEC that has shifted its focus to application-specific processors (ASIPs), announced several design wins at the Design Automation Conference here.

South Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Sensata Technologies (Cambridge, Mass.), Silicon Laboratories (Austin, Texas), and Sound Design Technologies (Burlington, Ont.) have adopted Target's IP Designer tool suite, Target said.

"Our expansion into the North American market seems to have been well timed with the growing popularity of ASIP design," said Target's CEO Gert Goossens,

Target's ASIP tools help design and program customized processor cores. ASIPs are used to provide greater algorithmic and computational efficiency than products based on standard embedded processors. They also provide post-silicon programmability for designs not based on hard-coded RTL. Both uses are becoming increasingly commonplace in SoC and FPGA designs.

"Since our founding, we have been focused on enabling SoC designers to create IP blocks as ASIPs, which can provide unprecedented combinations of both efficiency and flexibility," said Goossens. "We believe our tools have been used to design more ASIP-based SoCs than any other tool suite out there. It seemed only logical to differentiate ourselves more strongly from traditional compiler vendors, and associate ourselves more strongly with ASIPs."

Target's "Chess/Checkers" tool suite is now called both "IP Designer" and "Checkmate." Software development kits are now called "IP Programmer."

Target is headquartered in Leuven, Belgium, with North American operations in Boulder, Colo.