IP COREspondence January 2022

CAST COREspondence – New IP Cores & More

CAST COREspondence
The IP Newsletter from CAST, Inc. — Jan. 18, 2022

Happy New Year! I hope your 2022 is looking better than the past two years. Though judging by our positive 2020 and 2021 IP sales, the electronics industry at least is still going strong with many new and exciting products.

CAST IP was at the 2021 DAC and RISC-V Summit Last month we were excited to exhibit in person at the Design Automation Conference and RISC-V Summit in San Francisco. Attendance was a bit low due to Covid, but we got to share upcoming product info with and learn from current and potential partners and customers, all of which helps us bring you more and better IP cores in the coming year. Thanks if you were there and stopped by.

You'll notice some of that new IP supports RISC-V. Selling royalty-free processor cores for more than 20 years, the open-source RISC-V ISA venture is the ideal supplement to our current offerings.

Stay tuned if you’d like to learn what else we have coming up, and read below for some recent announcements you may have missed. If any of these IP products—or anything in our extensive IP line—might help your next project, contact Sales ([email protected]) or I to learn more. And again, I wish you a happy—and productive—2022.

-- Nikos, Zervas, CEO, [email protected], +1 201.391.8300

RISC-V Low-Power Embedded Processor IP Core Now Available

We announced and are now shipping a second RISC-V processor core, the BA51 Low-Power Deeply Embedded RISC-V Processor.

Sourced from Beyond Semiconductors, the BA51 builds on their BA2X line—now powering hundreds of customer products—and is small, efficient, low-latency, and very configurable. It supports the RV32I or RV32E RISC-V ISAs plus popular extensions, and its options include user and supervisor privilege modes.

Learn more in the press release >>>

CAST Bears Witness to Silicon IP
Market Maturation

ESDA director Bob Smith interviews CAST's Nikos Zervas

CAST was one of the first to offer a form of silicon IP—“synthesizable models” in 1993—and helped grow and shape the IP market in the years since.

Bob Smith, executive director of the ESD Alliance, recently interviewed CAST CEO Nikos Zervas about the early growth, significant impact, and exciting future of IP. Read the blog post at Semi.org >>>

RISC-V Functional Safety Processor Enhancements

The RISC-V Functional Safety Processor IP from CAST gets ASIL-D certification and Edge AI capabilities

The fault-tolerant, functional-safety-ready, RISC-V embedded processor we previously announced — the EMSA5-FS IP core — has now achieved formal certification by SGS-TÜV Saar. Use this 32-bit processor for any system that requires ISO 26262 ADIL-D conformance.

Also, the EMSA5-FS will soon be able to do artificial intelligence and machine learning in standalone devices.

Called “Edge AI,” this gives devices autonomous decision-making without requiring a connection back to a cloud server. This dramatically reduces latency, overcomes poor Internet connections, and improves security. The optional TensorFlow Lite and RISC-V Zve Extensions that enable this will be available later this year. Learn more in the press release >>>

We are honored that the EMSA5-FS has been nominated as Product of the Year by Elektronik Journal. If you'd like to support it, go to the voting page (in German), if a pop-up appears click the left button for free access, then scroll down to the first section, Automotive, and select the EMSA5-FS. Thank you!

Semiconductor Industry Veteran Doug Ridge Joined CAST

IP veteran Dr. Doug Ridge has joined CAST, Inc.

Last fall, we were pleased to announce that Dr. Doug Ridge became CAST’s new Director of Business Development.

Doug has worked for Allegro DVT, Amphion Semiconductor, eSilicon, and Altera Corp. Based in Northern Ireland, he’ll use his extensive technical and sales experience to develop global business opportunities, work with the technical sales team, and provide a further bridge to Europe. Read more in the press release >>>

Elastic Video Codec IP: Implementing Video Formats Based on the End Application

Choose the best video codec IP cores for a particular application

Using soft IP cores for video compression and decompression gives you a wide variety of options for formats, performance, and silicon characteristics. This flexibility is great, but choosing the best codec IP for your particular application can be daunting.

Our Dr. Doug Ridge provides some background and selection tips in this brief technical paper invited by Chip Estimate. See the article at ChipEstimate.com >>>

20th Anniversary: CAST, Inc. and Fraunhofer IPMS

In 2022 we celebrate twenty years of CAST and Fraunhofer IPMS partnering to bring leading-edge but low-risk IP cores to market. Together we’ve helped hundreds of customers deliver automotive, aerospace, and other products with efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

See if the IP we’ve sourced from Fraunhofer IPMS might boost your design project, including the CAN Bus Controller, TSN Ethernet cores, a Low-Latency eMAC, and the new EMSA5-FS Functional Safety RISC-V Processor.

And here’s to the next 20 years!