ChipWrights Licenses DSP Core to Agilent Technologies; Agilent Selects Highly Scalable Vector DSP Technology to Drive Image Processing in Next-generation Office Equipment Solutions.Business/Technology Editors NEWTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 11, 2002 ChipWrights, Inc. today announced that Agilent Technologies This article needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications. Alone, primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of this article are not sufficient for an accurate encyclopedia article. has licensed ChipWrights' CWvx core visual signal processing See DSP. (ViSP) architecture. The agreement gives Agilent a highly competitive and scalable platform for developing digital office equipment control electronics solutions targeted to printers, copiers and multi-function devices. "ChipWrights has developed an architectural platform that is compelling in its scalability and application-specific focus," said Brian Bissett, publisher and editor of The MFP (MultiFunction Printer, MultiFunction Peripheral) See all-in-one and MFD. Report. "This agreement with Agilent represents a clear validation of that architecture and positions ChipWrights well in a dynamic image processing image processing Set of computational techniques for analyzing, enhancing, compressing, and reconstructing images. Its main components are importing, in which an image is captured through scanning or digital photography; analysis and manipulation of the image, accomplished market." Highly regarded among the SOC design and semiconductor intellectual property (IP) community, Agilent is known for integrating complex design blocks onto multi-million transistor system chips that run at the industry's highest speeds. The company has an outstanding track record of first-pass success in the design and manufacture of these chips. Agilent was the first to integrate Intel i960 and Motorola 68K See 68000. microprocessor cores into commercial and consumer SOCs and today the company continues to integrate the industry's leading processing cores into its products. Agilent has shipped over 100 million system chips into office automation and computing applications. ChipWrights is a privately held fabless semiconductor manufacturer. Its core technology was designed specifically for image processing and has broad application in the mobile consumer and commercial electronics markets. "Our design teams are responsible for delivering sophisticated, cost-effective SOCs for high-volume products," said Jeff Henderson, vice president and general manager of Agilent's Hardcopy Division. "We expect the ChipWrights architecture will enable us to reach compelling levels of performance and flexibility in our imaging products." "This licensing agreement with Agilent demonstrates ChipWrights' intention to rapidly proliferate its architecture into a broad range of imaging-based applications," said Brian Fitzgerald Brian Fitzgerald (born March 1 1947) is an Irish Independent politician. He was a Labour Party Teachta Dála for Meath from 1992 to 1997. Previously a trade union official with SIPTU, Fitzgerald was elected to Dáil Éireann for Meath during the swing to Labour in the 1992 , president and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of ChipWrights, Inc. "We will selectively license the technology where it makes sense. Working with Agilent gives us the opportunity to help deliver superior imaging results for customers worldwide." Announced in February 2002(1), the ChipWrights CWvx core features a high-performance, highly scalable architecture comprising a RISC processor RISC processor [Reduced Instruction Set Computer], computer arithmetic-logic unit that uses a minimal instruction set, emphasizing the instructions used most often and optimizing them for the fastest possible execution. and a highly- integrated, scalable array of DSP (1) (Digital Signal Processor) A special-purpose CPU used for digital signal processing applications (see definition #2 below). It provides ultra-fast instruction sequences, such as shift and add, and multiply and add, which are commonly used in math-intensive vector processing units. Its pure single instruction, multiple data (SIMD (Single Instruction stream Multiple Data stream) A computer that performs one operation on multiple sets of data. It is typically used to add or multiply eight or more sets of numbers at the same time for multimedia encoding and rendering as well as scientific ) and vector-processing features deliver unprecedented performance for image-processing applications. Its single programming-target design both eases and speeds programmability, and its scalability offers OEMs significant flexibility in product enhancement and time-to-market. This core technology complements literally any image-based application making it perfectly suited to products ranging from digital camcorders to cell phone cameras to office equipment. The CWvx architecture scales from two to sixteen vector DSP units. The CWv2 configuration supports eight 8-bit multiply accumulate operations (MACS) per cycle and is optimal for cost- sensitive applications. The CWv16 configuration supports 64 8-bitMACS/cycle and reaches application performance levels similar to the industry's fastest DSPs, but at significantly lower power points. Designed to simplify software development, applications optimized for a CWv2 configuration will automatically make use of the additional DSP units when run in CWv16 configuration. Software development is supported by a standard toolkit based on Metrowerks(TM) CodeWarrior(TM) Integrated Development Environment See IDE. integrated development environment - interactive development environment (IDE). About ChipWrights ChipWrights 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. specializing in the design, development, and marketing of a new class of digital signal processing-based devices called visual signal processors (ViSPs). Built on an innovative architecture comprising a RISC processor and a highly- integrated, scalable array of DSP vector processing units, this fully programmable, low cost, low power, and very high performance system-on-chip (SoC) family is ideal for building competitive products in the mobile digital imaging and video markets. Applications range from real-time image capture/presentation to image transmission/network media infrastructure. ChipWrights provides a complete software development tool suite and hardware reference designs. Headquartered in the United States, the company has offices in Newton, MA and Tokyo, Japan. Additional information is available at www.chipwrights.com. (1) See press release http://www.chipwrights.com/news/CW4011April30.doc |
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