CAST COREspondence The IP Newsletter from CAST, Inc. — June 17 2022
We’ve been busy adding new IP and additional features — see the articles below — and look forward to sharing them with many of you in person at Embedded World or DAC.
Our booth at EW is next to the Fraunhofer IPMS booth, which is convenient as we’ll be celebrating two milestones with them: the 20th year of our successful partnership and winning the Product of the Year award in Elektronik magazine’s Automotive category.
The award is for the EMSA5-FS Functional Safety Embedded RISC-V Processor, just one of the advanced IP cores we’ll be highlighting at EW and DAC.
The celebration at EW includes a booth-side beer party at 4:00 PM Wednesday (22 June), to which everyone is invited.
Stop by then for a drink, or any time at EW and DAC, to learn about some of the best IP products and IP teams you'll find anywhere. Or give me a call or email any time, and we can talk. -- Nikos, Zervas, CEO, [email protected], +1 201.391.830
CAST and Fraunhofer IPMS Celebrate a 20-Year Partnership and Product of the Year Award
Research and development organization Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS) and reusable IP pioneer CAST signed their first joint contract — for the CAN Bus Controller IP core — in 2002.
The partnership grew, producing some of the earliest-to-market and most-tested IP for the CAN bus, Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) Ethernet, and most recently, the EMSA5-FS Functional Safety Embedded RISC-V Embedded Processor.
We were honored to learn that the readers of Elektronik Magazine voted the EMSA5-FS to be the publication's 2022 Product of the Year in the Automotive category. As mentioned above, we’ll be celebrating this win at Embedded World, and everyone is invited.
We’ve been a leader in lossless image compression for several years, offering JPEG-LS hardware codecs that customers have used in space, military, and other critical application areas.
Now there’s a new lossless compression format that requires tremendously simpler computation resources while still producing good compression results. Called QOI, the Quite Okay Image format was invented in late 2021 by game developer Dominic Szablewski, who sought results like PNG but with simpler hardware and much faster processing. Sourced from partner Ocean Logic, we are proud—and excited—to offer the first IP cores for this potentially revolutionary lossless format.
More Lossless Image Compression with New PNG Codec Cores
Continuing the expansion of our image compression leadership, we recently shipped the PNG-D PNG Lossless Compression Decoder core. Sourced from new partner IObundle, the hardware decoder fully supports the standard, making it one of the most versatile PNG decoders available. We expect to release a matching PNG Encoder core soon.
White Paper: Comparing Lossless Image Compression Formats
JPEG2000. JPEG-LS. PNG. And now QOI. Confused about which lossless image format to use for which applications? Make a wiser choice after reading this technical article by our Dimitrios Bozikas:
For many years designers have found our CACHE-CTRL AHB Cache Controller to be effective for adding single or multilevel cache memory to systems that use cache-less ASIPs, DSPs, or embedded processors. ARM’s Cortex-M and our BA20 Pipeline Zero are prime examples.
Our partner Silesia Devices recently added support for AMBA® AHB5, the Advanced High-Performance Bus. This enables you to use the CACHE-CTRL with the latest processor cores while gaining all the security features of AHB5. It can be an excellent solution for many embedded designs and low-latency SoCs, including wearables, IoT, and other applications.
We are not taking this summer off! We expect to release this new IP in the next two quarters:
