Artisan Components is offering its 0.1-micron library platform, which includes memory generators and standard-cell and I/O libraries, for free on its Web site, (www.artisan.com.) All the products conform to Artisan's functional and modeling specifications and are fully integrated with the latest versions of leading design tools, the company said.

Also, said Artisan, the entire 0.1-micron offering is compatible with previous versions of the platform, which means users should be able to port their Artisan-based designs to the latest 0.1-micron process technologies.

The company said it will send free download passwords to current users. Anyone else interested can register online.

Artisan expects to run test chip qualification following early-access manufacturing runs at targeted foundries. Artisan will send a silicon-qualification results report to its users when it becomes available, the company said.

Artisan said it has made a substantial investment in monitoring design automation tools and methodologies to provide rapid updates to the library products as the target processes improve and stabilize. Artisan has been working with EDA vendors such as Cadence and Synopsys to ensure that its early-access customers get optimum performance and yield.

The library platform includes additional test features as well as enhanced architectures to improve the performance, power, density and yield of the resulting system-on-chip designs. Artisan's new FlexRepair memory-repair capability will be a part of the company's memory products in the 0.1-micron offering, providing tight integration between the memory generators and standard-cell and I/O libraries.

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Eureka Technology Inc. has joined MIPS Technologies Inc.'s MIPS Alliance Program, announcing the availability of several intellectual-property cores designed specifically to support the MIPS32 4K and MIPS64 5K families of cores.

This IP supports the MIPS EC Interface for embedded-processor cores and the SysAD bus for compatibility with existing OEM designs using MIPS-based CPUs, Eureka said. The company offers CPU bus slave, PCI bridge, SDRAM controller and system controller cores, the latter an all-in-one companion chip to the MIPS processor. Each of the cores has been preverified, Eureka said, and can be used standalone or integrated with other Eureka IP cores for different applications. The cores are available for licensing in Verilog and VHDL source code format, and in netlist format supporting most popular FPGA and PLD devices.

For more information visit (www.eurekatech.com.)

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Rapid-virtual-prototyping tool vendor Virtio Corp. and ARM Ltd. will integrate high-performance ARM models into the Virtio virtual platforms, offering software developers a virtual environment for developing embedded software before physical hardware is available. Combining the ARM models with Virtio's rapid-virtual-prototyping environment will give developers the ability to configure ARM core-based embedded platforms, the companies said. These virtual platforms enable the early development of embedded apps, middleware and device drivers in a virtual environment.