Dongbu licenses EnSilica RISC processor

LONDON – Design house EnSilica Ltd. has announced that Korean foundry Dongbu HiTek has licensed the eSi-1600 embedded RISC processor.

The eSi-1600, part of a configurable family of processor cores, is a 16-bit CPU core suitable for integration into ASIC and FPGA designs.

Dongbu HiTek chose the eSi-1600 following evaluation against other established, small footprint embedded RISC processors targeted at mixed-signal and SoC applications, EnSilica (Wokingham, England) said.

Dongbu HiTek's application code benchmarks showed that EnSilica's eSi-1600 had a 20 percent lower gate count than the and that with the addition of a single custom instruction it was also 36% faster.

The eSi-RISC architecture is scalable from 16- to 32-bits, starting from as few as 8.5k gates. It utilizes the GNU optimizing C/C++ compiler and Eclipse IDE for software development, and supports debugging on the target through a JTAG interface and hardware breakpoints. The development suite is common to both 16-bit and 32-bit processors.

"The fully integrated processor sub-system, including memories, peripherals and timers, will greatly reduce design and verification time. Furthermore, EnSilica's flexible licensing model makes the use of eSi-RISC very attractive for cost-sensitive, high volume designs," said Jinseok Koh, a director with Dongbu HiTek, in a statement issued by EnSilica.


Related links and articles:

www.ensilica.co.uk

News articles:

Mentor Graphics and EnSilica partner on FPGA IP platform

EnSilica updates eSi-RISC development suite

Dongbu forms automotive, power network