EnSilica, the Wokingham-based design house, has announced that Posedge, a California-based semiconductor intellectual property company, has licensed its eSi-3250 32-bit processor core in a multicore data packet processor SoC.
Posedge’s Residential and SMB Gateway processor is a seven core design that uses six eSi-3250 cores as datapath processors.
The processors carry out packet classification and packet editing, and another as a utility processor implementing high level functions, IPSec software and TCP offload.
Posedge is using both EnSilica’s Windows and new Linux-based toolchain to underpin the development process.
“EnSilica has provided us with an extremely flexible set of cores in the configurations required to deliver the functionality we need within a single SoC,” said Chakra Parvathaneni, vice president of marketing for Posedge.
“The eSi-3250 is also backed by a toolchain capable of supporting multicore debug and validation. We are now actively looking to use the eSi-RISC family in other solutions we are developing, including a new 802.11 WLAN MAC/PHY solution,” said Parvathaneni.
The processor core must support line rates of 2Gbit/s. It delivers 1.2DMIPS per MHz with a core speed of 500MHz on the 40nm process.
The processor code density is achieved through the ability to intermix 16-bit and 32-bit instructions, with all of the commonly used instructions encoded in 16-bit.
According to Ian Lankshear, managing director of EnSilica, the processor’s easily maintained C/C++ code capability will support future developments and upgrades.