Companies collaborate to grow industry adoption of configurable processor technology

ARC International and Toshiba Corporation have announced that they have entered into a strategic collaboration that is intended to increase the worldwide semiconductor industry's adoption of configurable technology.

Under the terms of the agreement, Toshiba has taken a multi-year license for ARC's ARChitect processor configurator, which offers a comprehensive set of design tools and resources using a drag-and-drop graphical user interface (GUI).

The companies will also collaborate on the development of a next generation version of ARChitect that is more suitable to Toshiba's Media embedded Processor (MeP), a configurable processor. This is expected to open up the benefits of configurability to a wider range of users.

"The Toshiba-ARC strategic collaboration is the latest indicator of how configurable processor technology is quickly broadening its appeal throughout the semiconductor industry. We project that by 2010 annual shipments of SoCs incorporating a configurable core will reach 1 billion units. The work of companies such as Toshiba and ARC is one of the catalysts driving this trend, as is the ability of configurable cores to enable a very high degree of differentiation in the end device. This is critical to keeping down the overall development cost of consumer products, which is an important success factor in today's price-sensitive markets," Jim Feldhan, founder and president of Phoenix-based Semico Research Corporation, an independent semiconductor industry research organisation, said.