Analysis: Why StarCore failed

The decision to dissolve StarCore LLC was issued by its board of directors on July 28th. The venture, formed in 2002 by Agere, Freescale, and Infineon with the mission of designing and licensing DSP cores, had succeeded in many of its design goals, but failed to generate the licensing revenue envisioned by its founders. In interviews conducted by BDTI with StarCore insiders, competitors, and observers, many explanations have been offered for StarCore's failure, from weak marketing and sales to a lack of sufficient engineering resources. Poor technology has not been one of them. BDTI has recently evaluated the SC3400 core, and the SC3400 core in the Freescale MSC8144, operating at 1 GHz, achieves a BDTIsimMark2000™ of 11900. This is the highest BDTIsimMark2000™ speed score to date for a fixed-point chip, beating out the 1 GHz C64x+ core from Texas Instruments.

One widely acknowledged contributor to StarCore's woes is the difficulty of the DSP core licensing business, as evidenced recently by LSI Logic selling off its ZSP core-licensing business to ASIC design house Verisilicon. A major challenge that StarCore and other DSP core-licensing companies have faced is increasing competition from other types of cores.

For BDTI's full analysis of the StarCore breakup, see Inside DSP.