DSP Group adds Eonic as tool partner

Electronic News, June 26, 1995

SANTA CLARA, CALIF.--DSP Group has entered into an agreement with Linden, Belgium-based Eonic Systems under which Eonic's family of Virtuoso real-time programming tools is being ported to DSP Group's core digital signal processors (DSPs), which have been licensed by about two dozen DSP companies.

The pact with Eonic Systems is the fifth with a tools vendor for DSP Group, whose strategy is to provide a variety of tools options to its licensees.

The agreement, the first between the two companies, initially covers the porting of Eonic's "Virtuoso Nano" to the PineDSPCore and OakD-SPCore products. The Virtuoso tools use a multi-level, multi-tool approach. The resulting DSPs may be used in such applications as speech synthesis and recognition, telecommunications, image and voice processing, and robotics. Later, Eonic Systems also intends to port other products, such as its 'Virtuoso Micro' and 'Virtuoso Synchro,' to DSP Group's cores.

Irving Gold, director of marketing and sales for the semiconductor sector of DSP group, commented "The rapidly growing family of design tool-kit providers for our DSPCores can give our licensees multiple options to produce quality application-specific DSPs. Having the Virtuoso family of tools is another important opportunity for our licensees."

Eric Verhulst, president of Eonic Systems, said "The ever-increasing complexity and data rates of DSP applications demand application specific integrated circuits to meet the cost/performance criteria." Mr. Verhulst said DSPs provide high performance at a relatively low gate count. "The Pine- and OakD-SPCores provide a desirable performance while needing only around 30,000 gates. Together we can offer the high level designer of tomorrow's products real-time design options that can promote faster time to market." A DSP Group spokesperson said in an interview that the collaborative marketing agreement calls for the companies to work together while Eonic Systems is porting the tools. In addition to supporting Eonic engineers via telephone conferencing, DSP Group holds quarterly meetings of its core users, who are all DSP Group core licensees. Eonic Systems will participate in those meetings. "There will be time there for the licensees to meet with or problem solve around this kind of design approach," the spokesperson said.

Although DSP Group is supporting Eonic Systems' engineers in their efforts to port the tools to DSP's core products, the two companies have not exchanged personnel and do not plan to co-market any products. Each will sell their own product lines and DSP Group will not carry the tools. The porting of the initial Virtuoso tools is expected to be completed by the end of the year, the spokesperson noted.

Virtuoso Nano is said to provide developers a multi-tasking programming model without the overhead associated with an operating system kernel. The product is suitable for implementing asynchronous dataflow applications, typically found in DSP applications. Porting of Virtuoso Nano to a core-based design is an illustration of how software tools can be used in areas where previously everything had to be coded by hand.