CAST Licenses GZIP Core to Tier 1 Wireless Chipset Vendor

AUSTIN, TEXAS — Design Automation Conference — June 7, 2016 — Semiconductor intellectual property provider CAST, Inc. today announced a recent sale of a GZIP data decompression IP core to a Tier 1 vendor producing wireless mobile communications chipsets.

The new customer is using the ZipAccel-D™ GUNZIP/ZLIB/Inflate Data Decompression Core to process compressed firmware stored in Flash memory on LTE chips primarily targeting the IoT market. This approach allows them to decrease energy consumption by reducing to less than half the number of accesses to the power-hungry Flash memory

Firmware compression like this works well because the decompression core CAST offers is fast and has a uniquely low latency—adding negligible delay to firmware processing in the chip—and is configurable to achieve the best trade offs of throughput, silicon area, and degree of data compression. Learn more about this novel in-chip application of GZIP compression in the CAST white paper ”Firmware Compression for Lower Energy and Faster Boot in IoT Devices.”

The sale also included CAST’s IP Integration Services, through which CAST’s experts handled fine-tuning of the core to create an optimum solution for the design without delaying the customer’s development schedule. This included balancing configuration options to yield an extremely small core implementation—under 40K gates—and developing a DMA-capable interface wrapper custom-tailored for efficient bandwidth utilization in the customer’s specific SoC architecture and bus fabric.

“Compression isn’t just for reducing the storage load in data centers or squeezing more in a wired or wireless communication link,” said Nikos Zervas, chief executive officer of CAST. “Savvy SoC designers are quickly discovering the power, bandwidth, and cost savings the ZipAccel compression cores enable inside of systems, and are delivering products their competitors just can’t match.”

The GUNZIP/ZLIB/Inflate Data Decompression Core is part of the ZipAccel family of data compression family CAST sources from partner Sandgate Technologies. A compression core and complete GZIP PCI-E Compression Reference Design Kit are also available. See www.cast-inc.com for more information.