2007 is shaping up to be an exciting year for both the IP community and IPextreme. During the IP-SoC 2006 Conference in December, Jim Tully from Gartner Dataquest reported that 2006 was an extraordinarily busy year for semiconductor and IP companies. Acquisitions, spin-ins, spin-outs kept the trade magazines with a continuous flurry of news. Mr. Tully also indicated that the IP community was not doing a good job of promoting the real value provided to semiconductor companies.

I could not agree more with his assessment and feel it is essential for the IP industry to emerge from the Dark Ages of service-oriented business models to offer true IP products that realize the full potential of design reuse. We look forward to leading an IP Renaissance with major players in the semiconductor industry and provide you with the highest quality, production-proven IP products available.

President and CEO

FlexRay Message Buffers:
The Host View of a FlexRay System
by Bill Rogers and Stefan Schmechtig, IPextreme - In a FlexRay node, message buffers are the means by which the application can decouple its message transmission and reception from the actual FlexRay protocol, allowing asynchronous operation of the application with respect to the timing of FlexRay bus. In this paper, we discuss the implementation, configuration, and use of transmit and receive message buffers in an example FlexRay node. More

Presented by:

On Demand Webinar:

V2 ColdFire IP Now Available: Maximizing the Benefits from SOC Integration of the Popular Core

Event Details
To View click Here
As the fully modernized descendent of the Motorola 68k family, ColdFire strikes an industry-leading price/performance balance. The ColdFire Core Architecture has a massive installed base in consumer and industrial applications. Now, for the first time, the V2 ColdFire Core and the V2 Core SPP, a standard product platform containing useful peripherals, are both available as IP through IPextreme for SOC integration.

This webinar explores architectural and implementation considerations to increase the benefit of integration. Valuable tips and techniques from experienced SOC engineers and software developers are highlighted. Join David Cote and Blagoja Golubovski, senior design engineers from Freescale and IPextreme, for this event.

An Introduction to IP Verification
By Michael Cizl Munich Design Center Director, IPextreme

IP cores have become ever more complex and so require a significantly greater verification effort than in the past. The classic way to test is to create input stimuli to the DUT (Design Under Test) and compare the outputs with expected output results. This method is called directed testing and can be applied in different ways depending on the type of design. For processors usually C/Assembler test programs are developed that include the expected results.

Directed testing is no longer sufficient though to fully explore large, new designs, especially their corner cases. Random testing has been adopted in an effort to get back to 100% functional coverage for all inherent dependencies. For example, the execution pipeline of a processor may perform incorrectly depending on the address modes of 2 or more subsequent instructions. Test randomness is achieved through parameters on which the generated input stimuli depend on and by using different seed numbers to drive the random number generation. Back to the processor example, two parameters could hold all the possible addressing modes of the two operands of an instruction. Varying the seed number for the same test scenario would then generate different orders of addressing modes. More

National Semiconductor brings embedded control and connectivity to the automotive market with its integrated CAN and Bluetooth® connectivity processors. The CP3 family combines a powerful RISC core with on-chip SRAM and Flash memory; on-chip CAN 2.0b active bus; and critical hardware peripherals like a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter with a large selection of hardware peripherals to maximize in-vehicle networking versatility. Applications include brake, airbag, safety systems control; in-vehicle network controller; and center console controller, just to name a few.