The decision to dissolve StarCore LLC was issued by its board of directors on July 28th. The venture, formed in 2002 by Agere, Freescale, and Infineon with the mission of designing and licensing DSP cores, had succeeded in many of its design goals, but failed to generate the licensing revenue envisioned by its founders. While the details of the breakup are still being worked out, StarCore has stated that it will honor all commitments to current StarCore licensees and that Agere, Freescale, and Infineon will have full rights to all StarCore technology, including DSP cores, subsystems, software, and compilers.
Most of the approximately eighty engineers in StarCore’s Tel Aviv design center will be absorbed into the Agere and Freescale design centers in Israel. Infineon is not expected to hire ex-Starcore employees. This reflects the continued commitment of Agere and Freescale to StarCore technology. Both companies have current products which use StarCore cores and are presumably designing the cores into new products. BDTI expects that Freescale will continue using the SC3400 core in its MSC81xx line of multi-core DSPs, the latest of which, the MSC8144, incorporates four SC3400 cores running at up to 1 GHz. Given the central role of StarCore cores in Freescale’s DSPs, BDTI also believes that Freescale will undertake the development of future StarCore cores. Agere, while currently withholding comment on its plans for StarCore technology, also appears committed to ongoing use of StarCore cores.
In interviews conducted by BDTI with StarCore insiders, competitors, and observers, many explanations have been offered for StarCore’s failure, from weak marketing and sales to a lack of sufficient engineering resources. Poor technology has not been one of them. BDTI has recently evaluated the SC3400 core, and the SC3400 core in the Freescale MSC8144, operating at 1 GHz, achieves a BDTIsimMark2000™ of 11900. This is the highest BDTIsimMark2000™ speed score to date for a fixed-point chip, beating out the 1 GHz C64x+ core from Texas Instruments.
One widely acknowledged contributor to StarCore’s woes is the difficulty of the DSP core licensing business, as evidenced recently by LSI Logic selling off its ZSP core-licensing business to ASIC design house Verisilicon. A major challenge that StarCore and other DSP core-licensing companies have faced is increasing competition from other types of cores. Recently introduced general-purpose processor (GPP) cores, such as the ARM1136 and MIPS24KEc, offer significantly more DSP performance than previous generation GPPs. In some cases, these DSP-enhanced GPPs are powerful enough to replace a DSP processor, lowering overall chip cost. StarCore bucked this trend to some extent, positioning its cores as suitable for subsuming the functionality of GPPs. Indeed, Jeff Nutt, licensing manager at Freescale’s wireless and mobile systems group stated in a recent EE Times article that in Freescale 3G handset modem chips the SC3400 core will subsume the controller functionality previously implemented with an ARM core. But in many applications it is easier for GPPs to subsume DSP functionality than vice versa, due to the larger quantity of existing GPP application software. Another challenge for DSP core licensors has come from configurable core vendors ARC and Tensilica, whose cores can achieve very high performance when tailored to the specific requirements of an application.
The breakup of StarCore leaves CEVA as the only company focused on DSP core licensing. Verisilicon has announced plans to continue developing and licensing the ZSP DSP cores; however, the company is primarily an ASIC design house, and may choose not to license the ZSP cores to its design-services competitors. While Agere and Freescale may continue to develop the StarCore cores, it is unlikely they will enter the core-licensing business. This leaves CEVA without DSP core licensor competitors, but facing many of the same challenges that put its former competitors out of business.
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