On July 22nd, ARM Ltd. and Adelante Technologies announced that ARM has acquired Adelante’s Belgium-based A|RT coprocessor technology division. (The acquisition does not affect Adelante’s licensable DSP core division in the Netherlands.)
The A|RT technology allows users to develop application-specific coprocessors to accelerate computationally intensive portions of applications. The resulting processor (or “data engine,” as ARM now refers to it) can be used alone or in combination with (for example) an ARM core and/or a general-purpose DSP. Historically, the A|RT tool has focused on digital signal processing application areas such as telecom and multimedia.
The A|RT tool has been offered commercially under various names (and by several companies) for a number of years, but it has never found widespread market acceptance. ARM hopes that its own credibility in the market will boost interest and confidence in A|RT technology and help the tool to find the foothold that has proven elusive so far. In fact, far from seeing the tool’s long and unspectacular history as a deterrent, ARM says that the tool’s maturity was a key motivation for the acquisition.
In previous incarnations, A|RT technology was offered as a tool to build custom application-specific coprocessors from scratch. This methodology isn’t what will be offered to ARM’s customers, however. Instead, they will be able to license an ARM-supplied coprocessor “template architecture” and tools to enable architectural customization. In addition, ARM plans to offer off-the-shelf data engines, which will include standard signal processing functions such as Viterbi decoders. These engines are programmable, but not customizable.
It is interesting that ARM chose to acquire a technology for providing customizable DSP-oriented cores rather than acquiring one of the many general-purpose DSP core companies that are struggling in the market. ARM states that it believes that the architectural customizability provided by the A|RT tool is a key advantage for current and future DSP-oriented applications, because it offers many of the benefits of a hardwired solution (lower power, smaller die size, etc.) while still allowing software-level modifications. ARM expects the A|RT technology to be used by its licensees to target a wide spectrum of signal-processing-intensive applications, such as 3G baseband modems, wireless LANs, and imaging.
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