Artisan IP Selected by Sandburst for Advanced HIBEAM Chipset; Silicon-Proven IP and Ease of Use Enabled Sandburst's First-Pass Silicon.SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Artisan Components, Inc. (Nasdaq:ARTI), a leading provider of physical intellectual property (IP), and Sandburst(R) Corporation, a provider of adaptive silicon for advanced packet systems, today announced that Artisan's analog and digital IP was selected by Sandburst for use in its latest HIBEAM(R) Packet Switching A network technology that breaks up a message into small packets for transmission. Unlike circuit switching, which requires the establishment of a dedicated point-to-point connection, each packet in a packet-switched network contains a destination address. Chipset. This innovative solution is a high capacity, non-blocking switch fabric chipset optimized for supporting the industry's highest levels of Ethernet and IP switching Switching TCP/IP packets at high speed. Ipsilon's IP Switch started the trend and various vendors followed suit with different approaches, including Cisco's tag switching and 3Com's Fast IP. The goal was to switch IP packets faster than traditional router-based layer 3 forwarding. . In their product development, Sandburst moved from an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) Pronounced "a-sick." A chip that is custom designed for a specific application rather than a general-purpose chip such as a microprocessor. environment to customer owned tooling (COT) environment where IP integration and speed were critical issues for their design's success. Sandburst's BME-3200/SE-4000 chip design required integration of large amounts of high-speed memories running at many different frequencies. Additionally, Sandburst's design required increased throughput and performance coupled with a unique mixed-mode of operation whereby a single device can support both arbitration and switching. The mixed mode functionality enables Sandburst's OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) The rebranding of equipment and selling it. The term initially referred to the company that made the products (the "original" manufacturer), but eventually became widely used to refer to the organization that buys the products and customers to leverage the BME-3200 to support a single-chip 80 Gbps switch fabric solution. The BME-3200/SE-4000 provides the crossbar functionality and QoS arbitration required by packet switching systems. SE-4000-based fabric cards require half the space and consume half the power of the first generation SE-1600. The SE-4000 scales linearly with bandwidth requirements Bandwidth requirements (communications) The channel bandwidths needed to transmit various types of signals, using various processing schemes. Every signal observed in practice can be expressed as a sum (discrete or over a frequency continuum) of sinusoidal supporting packet fabrics ranging from 40 Gbps to 1.28 Tbps, which allows system designers to maximize efficiency while using the minimum number of devices. Sandburst selected Artisan's high-speed DDR (Double Data Rate) Refers to an SDRAM memory chip that increases performance by doubling the effective data rate of the frontside bus. For more details, see SDRAM. DDR - Double Data Rate Random Access Memory PHY See physical layer and physical. solution consisting of PLLs, DLLs and DDR I/Os and HSTL HSTL High-Speed Transceiver Logic (family of logic integrated circuits) HSTL High-Speed Transistor Logic (electronics) and LVDS (Low Voltage Differential Signaling) A transmission method for sending digital information. LVDS sends data over data high and data low lines rather than data and ground. high-speed I/Os optimized for TSMC's 0.13-micron process for its HIBEAM chipset. Additionally, Sandburst used Artisan's single-port memory generators and register files and its SAGE(TM)-X and SAGE(TM)-HS Standard Cell Libraries in the chipset design. "The fact that Sandburst was able to achieve first-pass success on a chip of this performance level and scope is a testament to the strength of their design expertise and methodology," said Callan Carpenter, vice president and general manager of Artisan's Analog/Mixed Signal Business Unit. "Given the inherent complexity of the SE-4000 project, our job was to reduce risk factors wherever possible. As a broad-line supplier of IP that is both silicon-proven and mutually compatible, Artisan is leveraging Sandburst's industry-leading solution to provide a robust foundation of components that customers rely upon to build such impressive designs." "Artisan's IP integrated into our complex design reduced development time and helped us to successfully meet our time-to-market goals," said Karen Schramm, Vice President of Engineering at Sandburst. Sandburst's chipset accelerates the delivery of high performance packet switching equipment. By utilizing readily available packet forwarding Forwarding is the relaying of packets from one network segment to another by nodes in a computer network. The simplest forwarding model - unicasting - involves a packet being relayed from link to link along a chain leading from the packet's source to its destination. , traffic management, and fabric components, developers can focus their critical resources on differentiating features such as protocol software, network systems knowledge and management functions. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the impact of Artisan products on speed of design implementation and compatibility and statements regarding the performance and benefits of Sandburst's products and technology. These statements are subject to various risk factors including, without limitation, unforeseen compatibility issues, technical difficulties in design, integration or operation, continued demand, market acceptance and competition. We refer you also to the documents that Artisan files from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in particular the section entitled "Factors Affecting Future Operating Results" in Artisan's annual report on Form 10-K Form 10-K A report required by the SEC from exchange-listed companies that provides for annual disclosure of certain financial information. Form 10-K See 10-K. and its quarterly reports on Forms 10-Q. About Sandburst Sandburst(R) is a fabless semiconductor company A fabless semiconductor company specializes in the design and sale of hardware devices implemented on semiconductor chips. It achieves an advantage by outsourcing the fabrication of the devices to a specialized semiconductor manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry or "fab. delivering adaptive silicon to power advanced Ethernet and IP switches. Sandburst's HiBeam(R) chipset provides its system vendor clients with a complete packet switching data path for Enterprise and Service Provider applications. A privately held company privately held company A firm whose shares are held within a relatively small circle of owners and are not traded publicly. , Sandburst is financed by leading venture capital investors. Sandburst services the worldwide networking market from its headquarters in Andover, Massachusetts. For more information, see http://www.sandburst.com. About Artisan Components Artisan Components, Inc. is a leading provider of physical intellectual property (IP) components for the design and manufacture of complex system-on-a-chip integrated circuits. Artisan's products include embedded memory, standard cell, input/output, analog and mixed-signal components, which are designed to achieve the best combination of performance, density, power and yield. Artisan has licensed its IP components to over 2,000 companies involved in integrated circuit design. Artisan is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. More information about Artisan Components, including free library access, can be found at www.artisan.com. Artisan Components and Artisan are registered trademarks of Artisan Components, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. |
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