Duet goes 'royalty-free'; Lucent adds cores

According to Prabhu Goel, Duet's president and chief executive officer, a foundry's silicon royalty fee for an average medium-volume design can be as high as several hundred thousand dollars per year per design. With the royalty-free model, he said, customers can potentially negotiate a better wafer price because of the foundry's lower costs. Library evaluation kits and purchases will be available from Duet's Web site at www.duettech.com starting April 1.

Lucent Technologies' Microelectronics Group (Allentown, Pa.) has become the latest FPGA vendor to offer a program for third-party intellectual-property cores. Called Orca Core Alliance, the program seeks to develop a portfolio of cores for Lucent's Orca FPGA product line.

The alliance will focus on such areas as networking, signal p rocessing, RISC microprocessors, microcontrollers and memory controllers. Partners will typically provide cores in VHDL or Verilog source code. Designers will license the cores directly from alliance partners.

The first member of the Orca Core Alliance is Modelware, which has been offering ATM cores for Lucent since 1997. Modelware will add updated Utopia master and slave cores, a Utopia slave bridge, Utopia muxes, an OC-12 buffer and an HDLC controller as well as ATM physical-layer and RM cell manager cores. See www.modelware.com.

Also joining the program are Integrated Silicon Systems (www.iss-dsp.com), Silicore www.silicore.net) and Logic Design Solutions (logic-design-solutions.com). Details are at www.lucent.com/orca/orcacore/core_alliance.html.

Claiming to offer the most area-efficient produ cts of their type, Mentor Graphics Corp. has announced a suite of high-performance memory generators. The Memory-Plus Libraries-based on Mentor's Memory Builder and Memory Model Builder products-are parameterized, SRAM and DPRAM generators for deep-submicron applications. The SRAM design claims performance of greater than 700 MHz at 0.25 micron. See www.mentorg.com.