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IP COREspondence June 20, 2024
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CAST COREspondence The IP Newsletter from CAST, Inc. — June 20, 2024
We continue to deliver new and updated IP cores to satisfy diverse customer requests (see below). Some cores are developed by CAST engineering and others are sourced from our expert partners, but all conform to our stringent quality and ease-of-use standards and receive industry-leading technical support.
Get some perspective on our approach to developing IP and our goal to serve your IP needs better than anyone else in my interview cited below. And be sure to visit us at the upcoming DAC, FPGA Conference Europe, and Samsung Foundry Forum Korea events. -- Nikos Zervas, CEO
IP Launch:
LZ4/Snappy Lossless Compression
Lossless data compression can significantly reduce bandwidth and storage requirements in applications from huge data centers to tiny IoT edge devices. Customers have built efficient systems using our ZipAccel GZIP compression and decompression engines for several years. Now we also offer even faster decompression for some applications with a newLZ4SNP-D LZ4/Snappy Data Decompressor core.
We believe this high-throughput, low-latency, decompressor engine is the very first LZ4/Snappy IP core for ASICs and popular FPGAs. Remarkably fast, you can easily achieve throughput rates of 100Gbps or greater with multiple instances of the core.
If your next system can benefit from superfast, low-latency hardware lossless data decompression, check out the LZ4/Snappy press release.
IP Update:
RISC-V Processors get Boost from Cache
industry’s migration towards RISC-V processors. Our current RISC-V processor cores—the BA51 Ultra-Low-Power and the EMSA5-FS for Functional Safety—have recently gotten upgrades that make them even more attractive for your next embedded system.
Each processor gets a performance boost by now optionally operating with a four-way set associative L0 cache of configurable size. The BA51 uses this for instructions, while the EMSA5-FS gets both instruction and data caches.
The ISA support EMSA5-FS has also expanded, now including RV32 ISA extensions F and D, for single- and double-precision floating point arithmetic.
Though not revolutionary, these continuing upgrades demonstrate our commitment to delivering some of the best RISC-V IP cores available; contact Sales to see how you might take advantage of them.
IP Launch:
Bridging Streams to Memory-Mapped Interfaces
Our wide range of IP cores offers solutions for many of the specific issues facing system designers. An example is the new MM2ST AHB/AXI4-Lite to AXI4-Stream Bridge.
This core solves the problem of making streaming-capable peripherals (e.g., compression, video, or packet processing engines) able to receive input or store outputs via a memory-mapped AMBA® AHB or AXI4-Lite bus. It maps the streaming interface to a memory-mapped interface and transfers data through an external DMA, which it controls via handshaking signals.
Don’t have a centralized DMA available or prefer the streaming peripheral to act like a bus master for data transfers? Then our AXI4-DMA and AXI4-SGDMA cores can help you out. These bridge the streaming interfaces to a memory-mapped master port.
Perspective on CAST: CEO Interview
This SemiWiki interview captures many key points about our product line, our approach to providing IP, and our emphasis on serving customer needs. For example:
“CAST enables SoC developers to focus on where they really excel. We provide them with effective, reliable IP cores that they can use to build their systems, we bundle these products with class-leading support should the developer need it during integration, and we offer all that with fair terms that work well for both parties. Our customers have peace of mind knowing that every IP core they get from CAST is going to do the job it’s supposed to do in an efficient way, without causing any trouble.”
An element of the Better IP Experience we strive to give all customers is “industry-leading technical support.” While this is a typical marketing phrase for some vendors, statistics show this to be a real benefit for CAST customers.
By focusing resources and attention on better serving our customers—like building a 24/7, multi-time-zone response capability—we’ve seen significant improvements in two metrics we find especially meaningful:
First Assignment Time is the delay between a customer submitting a support ticket and our team understanding the issue and assigning the best technical person to solve it. We have reduced this from an already-good average time of 4 hours 8 minutes in 2022 to just 1 hour and 22 minutes so far in 2024.
First Response Time is how long after ticket submission it takes for the customer to receive an initial response—often a complete solution—from our technical team. We’ve gotten that average down from 20 hours 44 minutes in 2022 to a remarkable 14 hours 58 minutes this year.
Do these factors matter? Over 50% of our IP sales go to repeat customers, so we believe that they do.
Learn more about our approach in this blog post: CAST Customer Care Goes Beyond Just Support. And consider whether you deserve this level of support when looking for your next IP cores.
Another Successful CAN XL Plugfest
The CAN Bus Controller we introduced in 2014 was one of the first such IP cores available. Hundreds of customers have since found it to be reliable and effective for applications from in-vehicle networking through industrial systems.
The core recently underwent rigorous interoperability testing as our colleagues from Fraunhofer IPMS participated in the latest plugfest sponsored by the CAN in Automation (CiA) organization. There the core successfully ran with CAN XL products from Bosch, Kvaser, NXP, Vector, and other providers.
Success in this simulation of real-world environments boosts confidence that the CAN Controller core will also work well in your own environment. Read more about the plugfest in this blog post.
Join Us at these Industry Events
We’re at the Design Automation Conference next week in San Francisco, booth 2411, at the front on the second floor. Email with your interests and available times if you might like to schedule a meeting. Use the I Love DAC registration for a free pass to the exhibits and main conference presentations.
We’re also at the FPGA Conference Europe in Aschheim, Germany, July 2–4. Register with discount code FPGA24_MEETUS for a 20% discount on a guest ticket.
In Korea, we’ll be participating in Samsung’s Foundry Forum & SAFE™ Forum 2024 on July 9th in Seoul. We will be exhibiting there with other key partners in the Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem.
An element of the Better IP Experience we strive to give all customers is “industry-leading technical support.” While this is a typical marketing phrase for some vendors, statistics show this to be a real benefit for CAST customers.
