Motorola Inc has set up what it calls the Advanced Systems Technology lab as the focus for its system-on-a-chip plans. The unit, under the control of Motorola vice president Arturo Krueger, will act as a problem solving center for system-on-a- chip development rather than an actual manufacturing unit, and house around 300 staff. It will be sited at two sites in the US: Phoenix, Arizona and Austin, Texas, and draw on resources from other Motorola sites around the world. Motorola revealed the existence of an internal multi-year system-on-a-chip development program last month, when it signed a major partnership with Mentor Graphics Corp’s contracts division (CI No 3,434). Motorola wants to be able to re-use its standard and application specific IC design modules and package them into products, and says its program will encompass the sourcing, access and distribution of its IP intellectual property modules, and will use a standards- based methodology so that IP modules can be reused without any modifications needed. It will use the lab as a means to draw together the various chip technologies – PowerPC, M-Core, 68000/ColdFire, 68HC12 and digital signal processors. – that it has at its disposal to weave into system-on-a-chip products aimed at consumer devices. The first system-on-a-chip products are expected some time next year. Engineers from Mentor, Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys Corp will also be involved, and the company is expected to use standards efforts such as the joint Synopsys-Mentor design re-use manual, and work currently under way at the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance to underpin its work.
