The move marks Mentor's (www.mentorgraphics.com) first entry into Altera's Megafunction Partner Program (AMPP) and its first efforts to customize commodity cores for specific PLD architectures. Mentor made a similar announcement with Xilinx in November, but that agreement only provided Xilinx with RTL versions of cores that were not necessarily optimized for Xilinx processes.

Sheri Andrew, product marketing manager for Mentor Graphics' Inventra Products Division, said that instead of offering cores in soft version only, the company is offering the cores in netlists optimized for the Apex architecture.

"This is really a new step for us," said Andrew. "It is part of a new initiative within the company to get involved with firm IP [intellectual property]. If cores are optimized in advance, it saves our customers time in getting the cores integrated into their designs."

Luanne Schirrmeister, AMPP program manager at Altera, said customers can evaluate the cores for free prior to licensing via Altera's opencore feature, available at www.altera.com/Ipmegastore.

The cores will be sold and supported by the Mentor Graphics Inventra IP division and will be available for download starting in the first quarter of next year at www.mentor.com/inventra/netlist_program/altera_pld_program.

The optimized cores start at $5,000. Andrew said Mentor plans to add additional firm cores to the AMPP library in the coming months.

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Tiny core vendor MaxLock Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) is offering a 32-bit, 33-MHz PCI core through a shareware distribution method.

Max Dunn, president of MaxLock, said users can go to the company's Web site and ask to review the core. When the company replies with a password, they can download the source HDL and the rest of the PCI core package.

"They can even integrate it into their designs, but if they actually make a product using the core, users can license the master and target combination for $9,500 or the target only for $5,500," said Dunn.

"IP isn't our main business, but we think we have a great core," said Dunn. "By offering it through shareware, we hope to still offer the core without incurring the marketing costs."

Dunn said the core was originally implemented in a Xilinx FPGA. He said the 32/33 EuCore is a full package that includes PCI 2.2 compliance, master and target versions, support for all six base address registers, interrupt support, simulation models and pc-board layout.

He said the company also offers a $500 prototyping board for the core. The PCI EuCore can be downloaded at no charge from www.maxlock.com.