CAST COREspondence The IP Newsletter from CAST, Inc. — Feb. 8, 2024
After closing 2023 with our best quarter ever, 2024 is already looking to be a busy and satisfying year for the growing CAST team:
We are working with our partners and in-house engineers to deliver new products and capabilities to satisfy system designer’s needs for high-quality IP even better;
With our global, multi-time-zone presence and very experienced staff, we continue to provide what is probably the quickest and most helpful customer support in the industry, both pre- and post-sales; and
We are collaborating with leading firms, joining more industry trade associations, and participating in more face-to-face events to gain an even greater understanding of customer requirements and goals.
Read the articles below to learn about some of these efforts to bring you ever-improving IP products in this CAST’s 31st year.
And if you’re interested in developing your own more competitive, better-differentiated products with less time, effort, and risk, check out the IP cores we offer for ASICs and FPGAs, and let’s explore which might be right for your next project. -- Nikos Zervas, CEO
Ubilite Licenses RISC-V Processor for Wi-Fi Chips
System designers everywhere are considering RISC-V, and recognition of the competitive RISC-V processor IP we offer is growing rapidly. A case in point is ultra-low-power Wi-Fi chipset developer Ubilite.
Having tried other RISC-V IP with less than satisfactory results, Ubilite found we offer the small size and flexible power management options they require in a low-power RISC-V processor. Ubilite is also a repeat customer who appreciates the Better IP Experience we offer, and so they recently licensed the BA51 Ultra-Low-Power Deeply Embedded RISC-V Processor for their upcoming new Wi-Fi products.
“Like Ubilite with Wi-Fi, CAST provides extremely competitive IP core products that are high-quality, complete, and easy to integrate and use.” — Ubilite CEO Peter Gammel
Read more about how Ubilite chips enable the advantages of Wi-Fi connectivity with the low power consumption of Bluetooth Low Energy on their website and about their licensing of the BA51 RISC-V processor in our press release.
CC-Link is a mature, open, high-speed networking technology for connecting devices from different manufacturers. One of its newer versions is CC-Link IE TSN, which combines gigabit Ethernet connectivity with the benefits of time-sensitive networking. We’ll soon be verifying our TSN IP Cores against the CC-Link IE TSN specification; stay tuned for more info.
10BASET1S Single-Pair Ethernet (SPE)
Single Pair Ethernet (IEEE 802.3cg-2019 standard Amendment 5) uses one twisted pair of wires—not the four pairs of conventional Ethernet cables—yielding a thinner bundle that makes physical routing significantly easier.
The Gigabit Ethernet MAC and Low-Latency eMAC cores we offer already support the 10BASET1S and 100BASET1 SPE protocols. Now we have joined the Single-Pair Ethernet (SPE) Alliance, and are working with other firms to develop and demonstrate a new SPE switch IP core. Watch for news of this coming soon.
New — A Lean AXI4 DMA Core
Among the DMA IP cores we offer, the AXI4-SGDMA with its scatter-gather mode has proven its value to designers needing to transfer streaming data to or from memory while offloading this task from the system processor.
But not every system is that complex; for them we offer a new, leaner DMA that more efficiently moves data between peripherals with AXI4 Stream interfaces and memory-mapped AXI4 locations. See if this might be right for your next design on the AXI4-DMA product page.
GZIP Cores Focus at D&R Grenoble
We enjoyed participating once again in the December Design & Reuse IP-SoC Days at Grenoble, France. This year’s gathering of IP providers, analysts, and customers seemed better attended — and more stimulating — than in recent years, suggesting a positive upturn in face-to-face events.
From amongst our broad IP cores portfolio, we chose to focus on GZIP Data Compression.
In addition to some excellent conversations at our exhibit, our sales engineer, Dr. Calliope-Louisa Sotiropoulou, presented a paper on The Lossless Compression Challenge: from Networking to Data Centers(free D&R account required).She also had a great conversation with D&R’s Gabrielle Saucier; watch the video interview here for some insights into CAST and the applications our customers find for GZIP.
TSN Ethernet Live at Lattice DevCon
We were recently invited to participate in the Lattice Developers Conference along with many other key members of the Lattice ecosystem.
It was gratifying to be part of this important event for the Lattice community. All of our cores are available for implementation on suitable Lattice devices, as well as on FPGAs from other vendors. Give us a call to learn more: +1 201.391.8300.
Coming Soon — Faster Data Compression
This year we expect to ship a new core that focuses on high-speed lossless data compression. It will offer both Snappy, a Google-developed algorithm, and LZ4, developed by Yann Collet. Each of these can provide a medium level of compression with relatively low computational complexity and small latency.
While the GZIP/ZLIB/Deflate lossless compression cores we offer provide greater compression ratios, Snappy and LZ4 require fewer hardware resources. Optimizing hardware usage over maximum compression can be a better choice for a number of applications, including storage systems, network communications, firmware compression, and in-memory data caching. Watch for our Snappy/LZ4 IP core announcement in the next few months. If you can’t wait, contact Sales to learn more now.
Upcoming Industry Events
Stop by to “talk IP” with us if you’re at any of these upcoming events:
GOMACTech 2024
March 18–21, 2024
Embassy Suites by Hilton,
Charleston Convention Center
Charleston, SC, USA
Booth #105
This year we expect to ship a new core that focuses on high-speed lossless data compression. It will offer both 
GOMACTech 2024
Embedded World 2024