Scottish initiative adds online 'try-before-buy' cores for IC designs

Scottish initiative adds online 'try-before-buy' cores for IC designs
By Mark LaPedus, Semiconductor Business News
March 20, 2001 (5:56 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010319S0005

SAN JOSE -- Hoping to accelerate the development of system-on-a-chip products in the market, Scotland's Simutech has launched a new service that enables designers to download and evaluate intellectual-property (IP) chip cores over the Internet.

Simutech's offering, dubbed eValab, is being billed as a "try before you buy" IP brokerage service for the rapid development of SoC products, said managers in an interview here. The service is being jointly run by Simutech, the Scottish Enterprise, and the Alba Centre in Livingston, Scotland.

"What we're trying to do is enable the fast adoption of IP in systems-level designs," said John Reekie, director of marketing of the Alba Centre. This Livingston-based organization is the hub of a major Scottish initiative designed to propel advanced chip design, IP development, and test in that region.

The eValab service, which has been in the pilot stages for the last six months, enables designers to download, evaluate, and simulate a variety of IP cores from the likes of Infineon, Palmchip, Toshiba, and others.

It also has been endorsed by leading silicon foundry vendors, such as Singapore's Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Pte. Ltd., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC), and Taiwan's United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC).

The service can be accessed via any portal from an IP or ASIC vendor. "The eValab IP services will assist our IP and semiconductor partners to dramatically reduce the front-end design bottlenecks [in chip design]," said Steve Glaser, vice president of marketing for Simutech of Livingston.

"This new service offers IP and semiconductor vendors a huge competitive advantage by providing the ability to evaluate and qualify IP online," he said in an interview with SBN during a trip to San Jose. "This new service will save designers a significant amount of time and money in the process of selecting the necessary components [to develop] system-on-a-chip designs," Gla ser added.

The service is now available. Prices depend upon the services rendered.