Silicon Hive Announces New Development Systems

New Products Ease Software Development on Silicon Hive’s Programmable Processors and Offer Complete Validation at Hardware Level.

Eindhoven, the Netherlands – November 23, 2005. Silicon Hive, a semiconductor IP supplier in the Philips Technology Incubator, announced new Software and Hardware Development Systems today.

The new Software Development Tools, Version 2.0, improve productivity by a factor of 2 compared to previous versions, and add multi-core design flow capability. Also announced today, HiveGates, Silicon Hive’s new Hardware Emulation Development Boards offer a plug-and-play environment ideal for demonstrations, and hardware-level validation of applications.

Silicon Hive licenses programmable processors to SoC integrators and manufacturers in the consumer electronics industries. Products include families of HiveFlex processors, such as the award-winning AVISPA, that are tuned to domain specific applications such as communications or media processing. The power of the highly parallel HiveFlex processors are unlocked by Silicon Hive’s patented Software Development Tools, allowing customers to add their own unique differentiated software on top of HiveFlex cores. Further, all Silicon Hive’s HiveFlex processors can be emulated on the new HiveGates development boards.

Silicon Hive’s Software Development Tools are a complete environment for embedded software development, integrating the company’s revolutionary HiveCC ANSI-C compiler, a simulator/emulator, and a debugger. Version 2.0 of the Software Development Tools features further compiler optimisations that greatly improve programming productivity, and offer seamless integrated simulation/emulation/execution across design levels, c source; cycle-accurate; and hardware.

New features of the Software Development Tools include:

Multi-core system modelling
Support for top down designs
Improved run-time (HRT) that supports host code at all levels of simulation and execution of a multi-core system in one single API,
Improved Code Compaction
Hardware prototyping using HiveGates

HiveGates enables customers to emulate one or more HiveFlex processors on a cost-effective and user-friendly platform. Thus Multi-core demonstrations are also possible on HiveGates boards.

HiveGates Emulation Board

Availability

Version 2.0 of the Software Development Tools is available for licensing, along with any HiveFlex processor, starting December 1, 2005.
HiveGates Hardware Emulation Systems for any HiveFlex processor also go on sale December 1, 2005, with pricing starting at $15,000 (USD).

About Silicon Hive

Silicon Hive is a worldwide supplier of semiconductor intellectual property. The company designs, builds and sells application-specific solutions for communications and media processing; tuned processor cores; and program development tools with application libraries. Silicon Hive products enable semiconductor companies to make fully programmable System-on-Chips (SoCs). The patented technology has been matured over a 10 years period at Philips Research. Silicon Hive belongs to the portfolio of the Philips Technology Incubator and is a fully owned business of Philips Electronics N.V.