Montpellier, France and Marina del Rey, California, 24th May 2012. Cortus, a technology leader in ultra low power, silicon efficient 32-bit processor IP and MOSIS, a provider of low-cost prototyping and small volume production services for custom ICs, announced the signing of a sales representative agreement. Under the agreement, MOSIS will offer the Cortus APS3R and associated peripherals to their customers. The deal will support the licensing of Cortus IP from design through prototyping to volume production with MOSIS.
Today’s embedded SoC applications such as short range wireless communication, video processing, touchscreen displays, automotive sensors and SIM cards all require minimising both power dissipation and silicon area. The Cortus APS3R offers the smallest silicon footprint and lowest power dissipation available on the market for 32 bit processor IP cores.
The MOSIS MPW service allows multiple products to be fabricated on a shared mask set and silicon wafer; cost sharing is based on the area used by each design. Both integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) and fabless semiconductor companies use MPW services to dramatically reduce chip development costs when they need a few tens of samples for evaluation. The service is equally cost-effective for low volume production, typically up to 1,000 pieces of each device. When device evaluation is complete, migration to a dedicated wafer run for high volume production is easily realized.
“By matching the licensing of Cortus IP to the MOSIS silicon fabrication service model, commercial IC developers will be able to optimise their costs from concept to prototype”, says Wes Hansford, Director at MOSIS. He adds, “We welcome the opportunity to offer Cortus’ low power processor cores to our SoC customers”.
“Our agreement will enable technology companies to develop integrated circuits for new applications with low commercial and technical risk”, said Michael Chapman, CEO and President of Cortus. He adds, “The business model available through MOSIS will enable APS3R licensees to scale their costs in line with their silicon volumes”.
The agreement covers the APS3R 32-bit modern RISC microcontroller and Cortus peripherals. The peripherals include commonly used standard peripherals such as timers, counters, UARTs, GPIO, I2C and SPI as well as an Ethernet MAC, USB 2.0 device and USB 2.0 OTG module.
The APS3R offers the best performance in the industry in terms of DMIPS/mW and DMIPS/mm2 and has been licensed for low power applications such as Bluetooth LE, security, automotive sensors, touchscreen controllers and SIM cards.
The ecosystem around the Cortus APS3R microcontroller core is rich and well developed, and it includes peripherals commonly used in embedded systems, bus bridges to ensure easy interfacing to other IP and system support and functions. A full development environment (for C and C++) is available, which can be customised and branded for final customer use.
Cortus is exhibiting at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2012 in San Francisco, California from 4th-6th June at Booth #304.
http://www2.dac.com/ebooth/exhibitor.aspx?confid=24&mpid=2172
MOSIS is exhibiting at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2012 in San Francisco, California from 4th-6th June at Booth #1119.
http://www2.dac.com/ebooth/exhibitor.aspx?confid=24&mpid=493
About Cortus S.A.:
Cortus S.A. is the cost/performance leader for 32 bit processor IP for embedded systems. Cortus cores are used in applications where one or more of small silicon footprint, low power consumption, good code density/small code memory size and high performance are important.
Cortus is the world leader in terms of DMIPS per square micrometre and DMIPS per microwatt.
About MOSIS
MOSIS is a low-cost prototyping and small-volume production service for VLSI circuit development. Since 1981, MOSIS has fabricated more than 50,000 circuit designs for commercial firms, government agencies, and research and educational institutions around the world.
