StarCore, built to compete with DSP, faces bankruptcy

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StarCore, built to compete with DSP, faces bankruptcy [Copy link]

August 10, 2006 International Electronic Business

Will Strauss, president of market research firm Forward Concepts, recently said that StarCore LLC, a digital signal processor (DSP) licensing company formed by Agere Systems, Freescale and Infineon, will be officially closed on August 15. A StarCore spokesperson confirmed that StarCore will cease operations and the company's 100 employees will be transferred to Agere, Freescale and Infineon. "While StarCore finally introduced a high-performance DSP core this year, the Freescale MSC8144 quad-core 1-GHz chip, it was not successful in licensing early cores to other vendors to support subsequent development activities," Strauss said in an emailed note. The parties decided not to maintain StarCore and instead each developed its own DSP technology in-house, the spokesman said. StarCore was originally formed to gain an edge in the performance competition with then-market leader Texas Instruments, and its original formation company has since undergone a series of dramatic transformations. StarCore LLC was formed in June 2002 and opened on October 1, 2002 as an independent company. Its origins can be traced back to 1998, when Lucent Microelectronics and Motorola SPS established the StarCore Technology Center (SCTC), which later became Agere and Motorola SPS later became Freescale Semiconductor. Later, Infineon Technologies joined the group. Infineon's predecessor was Siemens' semiconductor division. StarCore has launched several products, including the SC1000, SC2000 and V5 processor architectures. StarCore's publicly announced DSP licensees include Acoustic Technologies, Legerity, Samsung and Skyworks. Earlier this year, Freescale teamed up with Nokia and Symbian to launch a 3G mobile phone reference design later this year, costing less than $150. Freescale's MXC300-30 3G platform uses a shared memory approach and has a single-core modem design, using StarCore's SC140 DSP as the driver for the entire communication engine stack, and also uses ARM1136.