Interesing article from EE Times regarding IBM's IP licensing of the PowerPC core. Note the following paragraph (I wonder if LGPT has been considered?):
"Mentor is talking with at least 25 companies about additional cores for its Inventra libraries, Braune said. At the top on Mentor's wish list are an off-the-shelf PCI core — expected by early next year — and a Fast Ethernet core. The latter core could take longer to snare because its analog portion is tricky to implement, Mentor said."
Electronica: PowerPC licensing deal opens options to core users
By Brian Fuller and Richard Wallace
EE Times
(11/12/98, 12:04 p.m. EDT)
MUNICH, Germany — The licensing deal between IBM Microelectronics
and Mentor Graphics Corp. involving PowerPC cores puts a new twist
into the intellectual property (IP) publishing business by giving designers a far wider range of manufacturing options than currently exist for high-end embedded microprocessor cores.
"This is the first time a 32-bit microprocessor architecture will be available through an independent intellectual property [IP] provider," said Ron Tessitore, director of microcontroller development for IBM
Microelectronics, at the formal rollout of the agreement at Electronica '98 on Monday (Nov. 9).
The deal effectively will allow system makers to design-in a PowerPC core and then shop around at multiple semiconductor sources for the most competitive silicon manufacturing deal — either at an IBM
Microelectronics facility or at any third-party IC foundry.
Such technology is typically licensed through semiconductor vendors and manufacturers and is tightly linked to those providers' foundries, IBM said.
"A lot of designers and system makers have been burned in the past on
embedded architectures because they've been locked into a single
manufacturer of a single fab," said Bernd Braune, senior vice president of Mentor Graphics (Wilsonville, Ore.). The deal is "more than a second-source" agreement, Bernd said. "The non-exclusive arrangement also allows Mentor to use IBM's local bus and on-chip peripheral bus architectures in its libraries.
"IBM's agreement with Mentor Graphics demonstrates strong support for our IP publishing business model," Braune said. "This relationship will put a 32-bit processor directly into the hands of users through independent distribution, in an open environment not tied to any foundry."
Mentor Graphics has added the PowerPC to its two-year-old Inventra library by licensing IBM Corp.'s tiny but powerful PowerPC 401 and 405 cores.
"It's a good architecture," Braune said. "There is a lot of 68k designs out there and ARM and MIPS, but most of the new designs are PowerPC because of its small footprint."
IBM already offers the 401 and 405 PowerPC cores in its own BlueLogic
libraries. The 401 claims 84-Mips performance in a 0.35-micron CMOS
process. It dissipates as little as 160 mW of power at 3.3 V.
The 405, unveiled last month as the newest member of the BlueLogic family, is a two square-millimeter core manufactured in IBM's advanced 0.25-micron technology that runs up to 200 MHz. It is intended in part for communications, imaging and consumer electronics applications and serves as an upgrade to 401-based designs, said Elliott H. Newcombe, product marketing and applications manager for IBM (Research Triangle Park, N.C.).
The 405 dissipates as little as 400 mW of power. Its features including a multiply-accumulate (MAC) unit that completes a MAC operation in two cycles to provide high performance integer arithmetic for DSP applications such as soft modems and disk-drive controllers.
Mentor is talking with at least 25 companies about additional cores for its Inventra libraries, Braune said. At the top on Mentor's wish list are an off-the-shelf PCI core — expected by early next year — and a Fast Ethernet core. The latter core could take longer to snare because its analog portion is tricky to implement, Mentor said.
IBM Microelectronics has scored a wide range of high volume design-wins for the PowerPC, said Tessitore, who cited key wins in the ink jet, laser printer, set-top box markets, and in other communications and consumer devices.
"We have [design] wins of several hundreds of thousands of set-top boxes," said Tessitore. Sagem, the French engineering company that's done contract manufacturing of set-top boxes for the European market, is one such customer, he said. Other high volume PowerPC design-ins have been scored in the disk drive and cable modem markets.
"We also have a design win in the millions of units in printers with Peerless [Systems Corp.]," Tessitore said. "We're trying to make PowerPC a standard." |
