Acorn reinvents itself as IP-vendor Element 14

Element 14 is an operating company of Acorn Group plc and continues to trade on the London Stock Exchange. The company retains a 24.8 percent stake in ARM Holdings plc, a well-known silicon IP company.

In the last few weeks, Acorn has announced the sale of its 50 percent stake in Xemplar Ltd., a supplier of educational computers, to Apple Computer Inc., its joint-venture partner in Xemplar, and has acquired a seven-person IC design team in Bristol, England, from STMicroelectronics.

These moves were made as part of Element 14's concentration on the creation of multimedia intellectual property, initially for the digital TV market. The company's name refers to silicon, which has an atomic number of 14 on the per iodic table.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Element 14 also has silicon IP development facilities in Bristol, U.K., and offices in Palo Alto, Calif. Andy Mee, senior vice president for sales and marketing at Element 14, said the Bristol site would be expanded and work exclusively on developing cores, while the Cambridge site would develop cores, silicon architecture and complementary software.

"We anticipate the Element 14 name will help to establish our IP as the technology of choice in the digital-TV technology arena, and that it will strongly support our progress into the markets of the next millennium," said Stan Boland, chief executive officer of Element 14.

Library supplier Artisan Components Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) has beefed up its Process-Perfect advanced-memory product offering with the new High-Density Memory family of memory generators. Artisan has also added features to its existing famil ies.

According to the company, the high-density family includes a ROM generator, synchronous register files and eight generators that create synchronous and asynchronous single- and dual-port SRAMs. Artisan said the new memories are targeted at high-volume, mainstream applications such as desktop computers and most consumer electronics.

The company claims these high-density SRAMs achieve 130 kbits per square millimeter on a 0.25-micron process with a six-transistor cell. Like the High-Speed and Low-Power families offered by Artisan, the High-Density Family supports 0.15-, 0.18-, 0.25- and 0.35-micron logic processes.

Besides introducing the new memory family, the company has also added new features, such as byte-write, to its existing families.

Artisan has also brought down costs by making some of the features optional that were previously standard issue. For example, Artisan offers Universal Test Interface and pipeline registers as options. According to the company, doing so made it possible to reduce the starting price of the generators to $390,000.