Arteris, a venture backed by some of the semiconductor industry’s major players, says it has licensed its chip-to-chip interconnect technology to China’s Ingenic. Ingenic makes the processor that powers the Novo7, an Android 4.0 tablet that sells in China for $99.
Arteris says its C2C technology allows two processors in a mobile device to share a single random access memory chip. For example, the modem baseband can share the application processor’s RAM chip, meaning that the device manufacturer can remove the modem baseband’s dedicated RAM chip from its bill of materials. Removing the extra RAM chip also frees up room on the board for a larger battery.
Arteris is a Silicon Valley venture funded by ARM Holdings, Crescendo Ventures, DoCoMo Capital, Qualcomm, Synopsys, TVM Capital (a unit of Texas Instruments) and Ventech, among others. The company says Ingenic is the latest in a series of Chinese fabless semiconductor companies to license its C2C solution.
Ingenic says C2C will be part of its next generation XBurst mobile system-on-chip products. XBurst is the CPU core designed by Ingenic and used in its JZ47xx series application processors. The JZ4770 single-core 1 GHz XBurst CPU is the chip used in the $99 Android 4.0 tablet, which Ingenic says will make it to the United States this year.
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