Sican joins ARM design services program

Sican joins ARM design services program
By Luke Collins, EE Times UK
March 27, 2000 (12:26 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000327S0037

LONDON — Sican Microelectronics Corp. (Hannover, Germany) has become the third publicly announced member of ARM Holdings' (Cambridge, England) ARM Technology Access Program (ATAP). The deal means Sican has been trained and audited by ARM to offer design services based around the ARM microprocessor core, peripherals, tools and software.

Sican currently has ten staff in the United States and 300 in Hannover. Stefan Tamme, president of Sican Microelectronics in the United States, said most of his customers today use a processor in their designs, which requires an increasing level of software in the overall system solution. "We can do that today but it's always a custom thing. With the ARM partnership we'll have a close link to the architecture and will be able to create combined hardware and software solutions," he said.

"We also have access to their peripheral cores, so we don't have to reimplement the wheel [by] inventing a UART," said Tamme. "We're also looking at other people to bring in generic IP [intellectual property] into our flow."

To support the ARM deal, Sican will have to partition its existing Design Object cores into hardware and software implementations. Hardware versions will have to be adapted to the Amba on-chip bus architecture that ARM has defined.

Sican is the third company to join ATAP, following Cadence in Livingston, Scotland, and Wipro in Bangalore, India.

Luke Collins is the editor of Electronics Times, EE Times' sister publication in the United Kingdom.