SAN JOSE, Calif. and CAMBRIDGE, England, Dec. 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ParthusCeva, Inc., (Nasdaq: PCVA - News; LSE: PCV - News), the industry's leading provider of licensable Digital Signal Processor (DSP) cores and solutions, and ARM, (Nasdaq: ARMHY - News; LSE: ARM - News), the industry's leading provider of 16/32-bit embedded RISC microprocessor solutions, today announced a new and innovative development environment for their mutual customers. This development environment enables ASIC designers to combine ParthusCeva's DSP cores and the ARM® CPU cores -- the two leading licensed processor cores in the industry -- in multiple-core silicon products. Based around the ARM RealView(TM) development solution, this common development environment significantly reduces the development complexity, verification time and costs for such system-on-chip (SoC) designs.
Industry analyst Jim Turley commented, "The majority of new generation SoC designs will combine a CPU and DSP processor core in the same chip. Most developers have no experience using both, so developing and writing programs is an enormously complex task. This integrated development tool substantially eases the task, and will inevitably lead to better, more-reliable products faster. And it comes from the acknowledged leaders in RISC and DSP, respectively."
This ARM/ParthusCeva partnership enables hybrid RISC/DSP solutions to be emulated, debugged and optimized through a common development environment resulting in a significantly faster and simplified development process. The development environment offers a combined suite of tools using key components from the ARM RealView development solution including the ARM Integrator(TM) development platform, the ARM RealView Debugger(TM) and RealView Compilation tools plus ParthusCeva's Integrator platform-compatible Core Module Board and software support tools. This debugging environment enables concurrent software development and will limit expensive chip manufacturing that traditionally is required prior to verification and eventual ASIC production.
"As a significant number of ARM core-based systems combine a hybrid of CPU and DSP cores, this common development environment with ParthusCeva will greatly reduce the development complexity and cost of these hybrid solutions and should further enhance the capabilities of the ARM architecture," said Tudor Brown, chief operating officer, ARM. "This partnership will enable ASIC developers to bring their products to market quickly and cost effectively."
"Hybrid solutions combining CPU and DSP cores are key to practically all new digital devices such as cellular phones, digital cameras, PDAs and a multitude of multimedia devices," said Gideon Wertheizer, EVP and chief technology officer, ParthusCeva. "Our mutual customers will greatly benefit from the two respective leaders in CPU and DSP cores offering the first real-time, multi-core development environment to ease what has traditionally been a very challenging development process."
The common development environment can be used for joint application development, as well as multi-core debugging including multi-core cross triggering, to be used in multi-processor configurations and multi-DSP environments. The environment is fully-compliant with the Advanced High-Performance Bus (AHB), now the heart of the AMBA® methodology, including burst mode and efficient data transfer. The system incorporates AHB bus master and slave configurations, enabling flexible software architecture where either the DSP or ARM processor can control the data transfer. Peripheral boards can be mounted on the platform to handle additional functions such as video, audio, memory expansions or user hardwareaccelerators.
The development solution can be populated with various generations of ARM processors, including the ARM7(TM) and ARM9(TM) core families, alongside all members of ParthusCeva's Cores family including PalmDSPCore®, Teak® and TeakLite® DSP Cores and the most recent addition, the XpertTeak(TM) sub-system. The tools suite can also be utilized independently of ARM developments for DSP application development... |
