Sunnyvale, Calif. — Pushing to keep pace with advances in silicon technology, Motorola Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. have signed a cross-licensing agreement aimed at accelerating the development of the companies' embedded flash and microprocessor efforts.

The seven-year deal, announced at AMD headquarters today, has Motorola licensing its copper-interconnect technology and HiPerMOS, its high-performance logic manufacturing process, to AMD. In return, AMD is licensing its flash technology to Motorola, along with some networking technology.

Both companies will combine research efforts on these technologies while applying the work to their products independently. Hence, AMD will be producing copper versions of its K7 microprocessor, potentially with gigahertz clock speeds, by 2000, said AMD Chairman Jerry Sanders. Motorola, on the other hand, will gain the high-density flash it needs for embedded-flash processors.

The deal fills significant gaps in each company's technology, said Mario Morales, semiconductor analyst with International Data Corp. (Mountain View, Calif.).

"It looked like AMD was behind on the copper development," he said, while Motorola had been unable to reach the 16- and 32-Mbit flash densities required for serious embedded-flash efforts. AMD apparently had a copper project underway.

The alliance is also part of an ongoing effort to fill Motorola's gaps in attaining a systems-on-silicon "ecosystem," said Hector Ruiz, president of Motorola's semiconductor products sector. The company last month announced a joint-venture deal with Lucent Technologies Inc. to develop DSP technologies.

"[Motorola is] still going through a restructuring," Morales said. "It's important for them to develop technologies with companies like Lucent and AMD."

By joining forces, the companies also can assuage their research and development costs, which for AMD have reached $500 million per year, Sanders said. "The 0.35-micron and beyond generations require an accelerated pace in developing new modules of technology," said Bill Siegle, AMD chief scientist. AMD's R&D budget will continue to increase, but at a dampened pace thanks to Motorola's assistance, he said.

The companies will share equally in the costs of all jointly developed technology and will assign employees to one another's design labs: Motorola's lab in Austin, Texas, and AMD's flash group in Sunnyvale, Calif. Together the companies will develop Motorola's next-generation HiPerMOS 6L, which AMD expects to use on K7 processors to be built at its fab in Dresden, Germany.

Motorola of course has designs on copper-based processors as well. The company trotted out samples of its fourth-generation PowerPC microprocessor, measuring a tiny 80 mm2 and featuring the AltiVec instruction set. The part features 0.15-micron (drawn) gates and is being sampled to various customers in "networking and computing," said Bertrand Cambou, senior vice president for Motorola's networking and computer systems group.

In addition, Motorola hopes to have its copper-based DSPs sampling by the end of next year, Ruiz said.

AMD's own copper developments, which included research in laying down the seed layer of copper inside trenches, won't be scrapped, but will probably be added to the technology developed with Motorola, Sanders said. "We don't anticipate any writeoffs" in R&D, he said.

Motorola, meanwhile, is preparing for the day when flash takes over the embedded-memory market, comprising 90 percent of that sector by 2002. To that end, the company needed technology for larger flash modules, something AMD was able to provide.

Motorola has particular aspirations for the technology in the automotive market, where it claims to hold a leading position in embedded microcontrollers. "We need to accelerate this position," said C.D. Tam, senior vice president of Motorola's transportation systems group.

AMD plans to use the alliance's technology to move its microprocessors into the embedded flash market, "where we heretofore do not have a presence," Sanders said. But officials pointed out that any overlapping markets between the companies are a long way off. "AMD has no major competitive collision with Motorola," Sanders said.