ARC edges toward platform approach, profit

ARC edges toward platform approach, profit
By Michael Santarini, EE Times
May 14, 2001 (10:05 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010514S0028

ARC International plc (Elstree, England), the microprocessor cores designer, plans to expand its portfolio of peripherals through both in-house developments and acquisitions, the company said in announcing ARC's first-quarter results recently. Bob Terwilliger, president and chief executive officer, said the company is open to the possibility of more acquisitions, most likely among companies developing protocol stacks rather than hardware intellectual-property (IP). He said the company remains on course for profitability by the end of 2002.

"Protocol stacks take a fairly long time to develop and test. Something that is already in the marketplace helps us get to revenue more quickly," said Terwilliger. "Some of the things like forward error correction, we would consider doing ourselves."

ARC had already doubled head count to 40 at its Precise Software Technologies unit, acquired last year. Precise is moving to a larger, 20,000-square-foo t building in Ottawa to house its staff, which is working to expand ARC's range of protocol stacks available for license with its configurable-processor cores. ARC bought VAutomation Inc. at roughly the same time as Precise to expand its hardware cores portfolio.

Terwilliger said he intends for ARC to build up license fee revenue by selling more "platform IP" around the core. This was a driving factor in the development of the Tangent-A4 configurable RISC processor core, which started shipping in the last quarter of 2000, he said.

"A processor license on its own is [priced] between about $300,000 and $600,000. Our Bluetooth solution is about $1 million to $1.4 million. That is the sort of improvement we want to see," said Terwilliger.

For the first quarter of this year, license revenue climbed 13 percent from the final quarter of 2000, to about $4.3 million, and overall revenue went up by 5 percent to about $5.3 million. ARC's losses dropped to roughly $6.3 million, from $6.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2000.

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Xilinx (San Jose, Calif.) and Applied Micro Circuits (San Diego) have developed a soft-core interface to sit between a physical-layer device and a network processor.

The Flexbus4 interface, developed by AMCC, incorporates the SPI-4 standard developed by the Optical Internetworking Forum but adds support for ATM, said John LoMedico, vice president of marketing at AMCC.

The interface is already available in AMCC framers such as the Ganges line of chips and is being made available last week as a soft core for Xilinx's Virtex II line of FPGAs. The FPGA would sit on a line card between a network processor and a physical-layer device such as a framer.

Xilinx is making the interface available in one-, four- and 16-channel configurations. Pricing for the core is $14,995. Xilinx delivers these LogiCORE products using the Xilinx CORE Generator tool.Visit www.xilinx.com/ipcenter.

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Edited by Michael Santarini, with a contribution by Chris Edwards, editor of Electronics Times, EE Times' sister publication in the U.K.