CAST COREspondence The IP Newsletter from CAST, Inc. — March 10, 2023
A recent request from our friends at EDACafe got me thinking about 2023 predictions for the semiconductor IP market.
As we enter the 30th year since CAST‘s founding—and have been seeing record sales—everyone on our team is feeling pretty optimistic for 2023. Considering the overall industry, I see three likely trends:
The Semiconductor IP market will continue to grow.
Consolidation in the IP industry will continue, but there will always be room for newcomers and disruptive forces.
Political uncertainty may slow growth and will probably shift the silicon globe’s center of gravity toward the West.
Read more on these points in the EDACafe article, and email me your own opinions. Or drop by our booth at Embedded World next week if you’re attending.
And speaking of IP market growth, check out the articles below for several new and enhanced IP cores we’ve recently introduced.
The 32-bit embedded RISC-V BA5x™ series processors we offer are efficient, reliable, and royalty-free:
The new BA53 is a low-power, five-stage processor that can run at more than 1GHz on 22nm technologies.
The BA51 is an ultra-low, two-stage processor that can be as small as 16K gates.
You can use any RISC-V ecosystem tools with these BA5x processors, or the custom BeyondStudio™ IDE. This customer-proven, Eclipse- and GCC-based toolchain is available free with a processor license.
New this week is the I2S-TDM Multichannel Audio Transceiver. This digital audio interface core can act as either a controller or a target and supports all widely used variants of the I2S and TDM serial audio data formats.
Its multi-channel capability, essential features, and high degree of configurability make the I2S-TDM an excellent choice for nearly any system or application.
Released last year, the EMSA5-FS processor core we source from Fraunhofer IPMS won Elektronik Magazine’s 2022 Automotive Product of the Year award.
Now this ISO 26262 conforming, ASIL D ready, 32-bit processor core is further enhanced, with more functional safety features built in. These include an improved FuSa package with Autosar MCAL drivers and a Safety Test Library, an expanded set of peripherals and bus fabric, and an optional cache memory.
Read the press release for more on these new features, and also visit the product page for technical details.
Ongoing Commitment to FPGA (and ASIC) Users
Customers have had the choice of getting nearly all of our IP cores for ASICs or for FPGAs since CAST began. We were charter members in all the FPGA vendors' early IP partner programs, including Altera’s (now Intel®).
This year we are proud to have been approved again for Intel’s highest partner level, Titanium.
Participation in the Intel Partner Alliance gets us special training, early new device info, direct support services, and more. All of this helps us produce better IP cores and give quick, effective support to our many Intel FPGA customers.
SHA-3 Core Update: Run-time Programmability
In 2016 we released one of the earliest IP cores to support Secure Hash Algorithm-3. Sourced from Beyond Semiconductor, the core has been enhanced to meet our customer’s evolving needs.
Run-time configurability is the most recent addition. This lets a single instance of the new core implement all hash functions in the SHA-3 family, with negligible changes in silicon size or performance.
Next week — March 14–16 — we’ll have a team in Nuremberg exhibiting again at Embedded World. Stop by booth 4-569 to see how you might benefit from our IP products for Automotive Functional Safety, RISC-V, Data and image Compression, SoC Security, and more.
Attend Embedded World for free by registering with our voucher code: ew23493137
It’s also been 30 years since we started CAST, and we’ll be celebrating throughout the year. Stop by to learn some of our secrets for CAST’s longevity as many other IP companies have come and gone.
Upcoming Events
Embedded World 2022 June 21, 2022 – June 23, 2022
Exhibition Centre, Nuremberg, Germany
Booth:4-561
Customers have had the choice of getting nearly all of our IP cores for ASICs or for FPGAs since CAST began. We were charter members in all the FPGA vendors' early IP partner programs, including Altera’s (now Intel®).
