Motorola Inc teamed up with Lucent Technologies Inc yesterday to cooperate on the future development of digital signal processors, one of the fastest growing segments of the currently hard pressed semiconductor market. The two are to set up a joint design center in Atlanta, Georgia called Star*Core, from where they will develop next generation DSP technology. Initially, the two will cross license each other’s technologies. Motorola brings its DSP56800, a low-cost DSP with embedded microcontroller capabilities, while Lucent contributes the communications optimized high performance DSP. Lucent will also license Motorola’s M-Core 32-bit RISC microcontroller, which Motorola announced last October (CI No 3,271). M-Core will be used as Star*Core’s first DSP core design, due out onto the market in mid-1999. That product will emerge as both an M-Core DSP, and as a microcontroller base for an external DSP chip. DSP cores for the high-end multi-channel and low power terminal markets will be developed from scratch by Star*Core. A somewhat vague roadmap displayed briefly at the press event showed convergence across the range anticipated by the year 2003. Star*Core is set to open its doors in the third quarter of this year, headed by Bell Labs Fellow Dr James Boddie, a member of the team that designed the first single chip DSP in 1979. It will build up a team of around 100 staff over the next few years. The idea is that both companies will take the core technologies developed there as the basis for their own products, which they will separately fabricate, customize and sell. The deal is somewhat reminiscent of the PowerPC initiative between IBM and Motorola, and Ruiz admitted that Motorola had leaned a lot from the experiences of Somerset. The difference is that the Motorola-Lucent agreement is primarily about cores. The two hope that they will benefit from sharing expertise and resources, speed up development time, and encourage software tools developers to support the new architecture, an attempt to rival Texas Instruments Inc’s dominance in software tools. Lucent, in particular, which has always concentrated on large customers, has very few third parties supporting its DSP chips with programming tools. Lucent holds the number two slot in the DSP market with a 28% market share while Motorola, despite its strengths in embedded systems has only a 12% share, the same as Analog Devices Inc, according to figures from analyst Forward Concepts Inc. Even combined, the two trail behind market leader Texas Instruments with its 45% market share. The real market the two are after is third generation mobile communications, the next GSM, according to Forward Concepts analyst Will Strauss. While the tie-up puts both TI and Analog under pressure, it could also be bad news for Advanced RISC Machines, which numbers both Lucent and Motorola among its licensees.
