TCGNJ and thread,
Another big announcement which contributed to Lucent's rise today.
(But I hope LU doesn't get bogged down by "ROTOMOLA" which is also known to be a super dinosaur.
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Tuesday June 2, 1:38 pm Eastern Time
Company Press Release
SOURCE: Lucent Technologies
Lucent Technologies and Motorola Join Forces to Develop Advanced Digital Signal Processor Technology; Companies Establish Joint Design Center and Cross-Licensing Agreement
AUSTIN, Texas and ALLENTOWN, Pa., June 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT - news) and Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU - news) today jointly announced an alliance to develop next-generation Digital Signal Processor (DSP) technology and to cross-license existing DSP architectures.
As part of the alliance, Lucent Technologies' Microelectronics Group and Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector will create a joint design center, named Star*Core, in the Atlanta area. The Star*Core facility is scheduled to open by the third quarter of this year and is expected to complete its first core design by mid-1999. The two companies will collaborate on core designs, but will separately develop and market full-fledged DSPs based on those cores.
The companies will also cross-license each other's newest DSP cores, Motorola's DSP56800 and the DSP16000 from Lucent. In addition, Lucent will license Motorola's M*CORE(TM) microcontroller core.
The strategic alliance will accelerate development of advanced DSP cores for a variety of industries, including communications, transportation, and consumer electronics. For consumers, these advanced DSPs will enable manufacturers to develop a variety of new products such as hand-held wireless devices for surfing the Web, cell phones with video capability, and devices with speech-recognition capability.
DSPs are specialized semiconductor chips that perform high-speed mathematical computations with voice, data, and video signals. In today's ''digital boom,'' DSPs play an increasingly critical role in a vast array of devices, including cellular phones, pagers, digital cameras, and audio and video equipment.
A DSP core is a computing engine that can be used in many different DSP chips, regardless of the intended application. DSP cores are not stand-alone products, but are part of a customized chip designed for a specific purpose.
''We believe the collaboration of these two DSP leaders will yield advancements in DSP technology that will allow us to deliver next-generation products to customers more quickly and efficiently than if we each worked apart,'' said John Dickson, president of Lucent's Microelectronics Group. ''We expect the resulting cores to become a benchmark for the entire DSP industry.
''The companies have complementary portfolios rich in DSP expertise and systems knowledge which, when combined, will make this design center a powerhouse for developing advanced, sophisticated DSP technology,'' said Hector Ruiz, president of Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector (SPS). ''By pooling our diverse talents, we'll be well-prepared to create 'best-in-class' DSP technology for the future, and, in many cases, will be able to offer each other's customers a second source for DSPs.
Worldwide, the general-purpose DSP market in 1997 was estimated to be more than $3 billion, a 33.6 percent increase over 1996 figures, according to Forward Concepts, a market research house in Tempe, Ariz., specializing in DSP. Forward Concepts estimates the global DSP market will grow to more than $14 billion by 2002.
''The alliance is unprecedented, and is a very dramatic event for the DSP industry,'' said Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts. ''It underscores the importance of DSP in the coming decade and will certainly lead to new technology platforms that should be attractive for a wide variety of applications.''
''The alliance brings together two great semiconductor businesses with proven expertise in DSPs,'' said Eric Benhamou, chairman and CEO of 3Com. ''I expect the results of this venture will be extremely favorable to customers such as 3Com whose products rely on leading-edge technology.''
Dr. James Boddie, Bell Labs Fellow and director of DSP technology development for Lucent Technologies, has been appointed executive director of the joint design center. Boddie was a member of the Bell Labs team that designed the world's first programmable single-chip DSP in 1979. Motorola executives will be appointed to the positions of architecture director and design director in the coming weeks... ....
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Ibexx |
