Wednesday, January 22, 2003
Texas Instruments Inc. announced a partnership with Silicon Logic Engineering Inc. (SLE) on Monday (Jan. 20) under which the companies will jointly develop high-performance ASICs.
TI said the assistance of SLE — an intellectual property developer and design services firm — plus the utilization of TI's 0.13-micron CMOS technology, will enable it to pursue high-performance designs in the communications infrastructure. The partnership will allow TI to change from a "middle-of-the-road ASIC supplier" in terms of technology to one that can pursue designs for advanced switchers, routers and network processors, according to Steve Sutton, vice president of TI's ASIC group, based in Dallas.
Though the brunt of its ASIC business had involved wireless handsets, TI's ASIC group was always in a position to take in a customer's gate-level netlist and to provide manufacturing support, Sutton said. But its partnership with SLE and the utilization of advanced CMOS will enable it to "engage the customer at a higher level of abstraction, at the RTL or even the specification level," Sutton said.
TI can shed its previous low profile as an ASIC vendor and compete with the likes of IBM for high-performance ASIC designs, Sutton said.
SLE (Eau Claire, Wis.), a specialist in high-performance ASICs, employs a design team that helped build Cray's first CMOS computer. With roughly 35 successful ASICs to its credit, SLE tackles the most complex circuitry used in switching and computing, according to SLE chief executive officer Jeff West. One of the team's latest efforts, a digital System Packet Interface Level 4 (SPI-4) Phase 2 intellectual property block, defined by the Optical Internetworking Forum, will soon be ported to TI's 0.13-micron process.
The partnership is not exclusive for either party, but West said it makes sense for the companies to combine strengths for a common customer base. "Gauging by the level of interest we're seeing, this could be all-consuming' for SLE," he said.
By: DocMemory
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