Luca Benini, University of Bologna, presented a paper he co-authored with Stanford University's Ting Zhand and Giovanni De Micheli at the DATE Conference held in Munich, Germany, earlier this month.

The new JavaCAD tool is still a work in progress but promises to allow users to search IP databases using Extensible Markup Language (XML).

"The tool was implemented in Java and features a secure client/server architecture that provides estimation and IP evaluation/verification via the Internet without revealing IP details before an actual sale has taken place," said Benini.

The tool itself encourages core vendors to package their cores and users to query databases using XML.

The tool's "match engine" incorporates a "fuzzy" search capability that allows users unsure of what they want to specify selection criteria that are partially defined.

"The tool is used in an iterative process," said Benini. Users can query the engine to find IP that loosely fits a given project's functionality requirements. Users can search for criteria like power, throughput and area, among others. As the functionality of the design becomes more clear to a design team, users can then do more precise queries.

Once the user picks a core, the tool ships it from the vendor/server to the user/client and the core model is instantiated. Benini said the researchers built their own XML repository containing 1,000 cores to test out the system, but hopes that the tool could be linked in the future to commercial IP exchanges like Design and Reuse and VCX.

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Palmchip Corp. (San Jose, Calif.) has released an MP3 system-on-chip hardware platform featuring a configurable 32-bit RISC/DSP processor licensed from ARC Cores plc (Elstree, England).

The two companies are jointly marketing the integrated SoC platform for low-power, portable audio applications.

The PALM-FC-6710 is an SoC hardware platform with support for MultiMediaCard devices, audio input and output sources and serial interfaces, including UART and USB.

It includes DMA support for peripheral interfaces to buffer memory for reduced firmware requirements, and power management for low-power operation. According to the companies, the platform integrates ARC's RISC processor with 8 kbytes of CPU SRAM.

The platform features pre-verified and pre-integrated IP, so the companies claim the SoC development time, compared with traditional cell-based methods, can be reduced by up to four months.

Palmchip delivers the platform as register-transfer-level source code with models and testbenches.

For more information visit www.palmchip.com and www.arccores.com.