Lucent-Motorola StarCore Venture Has First Products.

The StarCore Technology Center, the jointly-owned digital signal processing venture set up last year by Lucent Technologies Inc and Motorola Inc, has released its first offering: a "compiler driven" DSP core optimized for low power and low system cost. The new SC140 is aimed at applications where memory is limited and power consumption is important, such as wireless communication handsets and personal digital assistants. It could also be used in forthcoming multi-channel telecommunications applications like wireless base stations and digital subscriber line central office equipment, the company said.

The SC140 is the first core in StarCore's SC100 family, which the venture says will deliver up to 3,000 MIPS or 1.2 billion multiply-accumulate operations per second. The core runs at 300MHz with a 1.5 volt power supply. Around 90% of the software code can be written in a high level language, unusual for the DSP market, where native assembly language is typically used for performance reasons. The SC140 uses parallelism, with four multiply-accumulate units, four arithmetic logic units, four bit field units, two arithmetic address units and a five-stage pipeline. It is based on 16-bit instructions, but can also use variable-length execution sets, so that multiple 16-bit instructions and optional prefixes can be grouped together for single-cycle execution.

StarCore says it has a set of baseline tools which are available under non-disclosure to support initial customer designs. Third party developers supporting the architecture include Green Hills Software Inc, Embedded System Products Inc and Enea OSE Systems.

Dataquest Corp is predicting 22% growth rates in the DSP industry, which it says it expects to be a $10bn market by 2002. StarCore hopes to win a slice of the market currently dominated by Texas Instruments Inc and Analog Devices Inc. DSP's from TI are currently used in Nokia Oy and Ericsson AB. Products using the new StarCore products wont appear until the first applications are written, probably towards the end of next year. The DSP World Spring conference is due to be held next week in Santa Clara, California.