The embedded DSP group of Philips Semiconductors and design house Frontier Design merged last month to form a new company, Adelante Technologies. Philips will initially be the majority owner of Adelante, but Philips plans to reduce its ownership below 50% as other companies join the partnership. Adelante will integrate Philips' 32-bit REAL (Reconfigurable Embedded DSP Architecture Low cost/Low power) DSP core with Frontier's tools and applications knowledge; the result will be a licensable DSP core that targets high-volume consumer applications like 3G wireless handsets and high-performance digital audio players.
This spin-off approach is not new—Philips itself employed a similar tactic with its TriMedia VLIW media processor, which was spun off into TriMedia Technologies. The strategy makes sense—designing, supporting, and marketing licensable cores requires a more nimble business model than larger companies like Philips are traditionally comfortable with. Moreover, a major challenge involved when chip vendors license architectures—that one's customers will often be one's competitors—is sidestepped when the architecture becomes the property of a new company. By spinning off, parent companies are able to maintain an interest in the new venture while increasing the new architecture's chances for success. An analogous trend has been visible among large companies like Siemens and Lucent, who spun off their respective chip units into Infineon and Agere.
Adelante hopes that its flexibility and technology will win it licensing customers in a market where many DSP cores are already available. While Philips has embedded the REAL DSP in a variety of chips, these chips have mainly been used in products made by Philips itself. Thus, the REAL DSP's potential for success as a licensable core is hard to judge. According to an earlier BDTI analysis of this architecture, the REAL DSP has strong per-cycle efficiency, a small die size, and relatively low memory bandwidth. Frontier's role may well make or break the core's potential for success: quality software, tools, and design methodology could make the REAL DSP package a very attractive option; lack of such infrastructure could undermine the entire enterprise.
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