Company Overview
Company History
Accent is a joint venture between STMicroelectronics (51%) - a global leader in the design and manufacture of semiconductors - and Cadence Design System (49%) - a world leader in software and services for electronic design.
Accent benefits from the depth of experience and design skills of the two founding companies, and their corporate and industrial partners. Accent takes advantage of its complete understanding of the whole integrated circuit manufacturing process (from idea to chip implementation) as well as access to the best technologies in design software. Company Objective
Accent S.r.l. helps customers worldwide to realise their new product ideas and concepts as well as further innovate existing products through the development of dedicated ICs (integrated circuits) and complex, high performance SoCs (systems-on-chip). Accent is focused on the business needs of IDMs, OEMs, fabless and IP companies.
Accent can provide a turnkey design service from concept and architecture definition through to design implementation and prototyping as well as assist customers' own design teams with experienced design engineers at every stage of the development flow.
Accent can also manage the whole electronics supply chain including access to the major foundries for volumes silicon with a COT (customer-owned tooling) approach through its Highway to Silicon programme and unique network of alliances.
Solution provided
Accent designs and manages the production on behalf of the customer of high performance, low power Systems on Chip.
Accent can offer a turnkey service from architecture definition through to tape-out and SW development, and to supply chain management for any production volume.
Accent has deep expertise in dealing with all phases of complex integrated circuit design and manufacturing, using state of the art semiconductor technologies, a wide variety of Intellectual Properties and the most advanced design methodologies.
Moreover Accent has implemented a dedicated program, ("Highway to Silicon") in co-operation with industry leader providers of service and manufacturing activities. Through this program Accent provides a one-stop-shop access to silicon technology, via direct engineering services from its portfolio and subcontracting non-core services and manufacturing activities to world-leading partner companies, while keeping full responsibility of the overall process in front of the customer.
With this business model, Accent acts as a Virtual IDM and provides much higher value services for both ICs and IC-enabled products and subsystems, starting from concept and architecture definition through design implementation, prototyping and manufacturing and test in any volume.
Business model
We have flexible business approach to provide customers with engagement models that best serve their needs.
Customers are attracted to our turnkey service / fixed price model, where Accent takes the IC design and realisation responsibility and commits to achieve the results agreed and defined in the project plan. Customers thus have the piece of mind of warranty on fixed delivery dates and costs, full ownership of the project results, simple commercial relationship (one stop shop approach) and can focus on their core business (e.g. product concept, definition and marketing).
However, Accent also serves customers that choose to outsource just part of their design and manufacturing activities.
Other business models are the following
Time & Material: the task objectives are only available in outline and the customer is responsible for project management.
Volume Services Agreement: the customer contracts to purchase a given number of man years of effort based on a specific engagement model, rate and work monitoring
What is unique about your solution?
The advantages and specialisations Accent offer to its customers are:
- low power SoC design, using VDSM technology down to 90nm
- breadth of experience and comprehensive service portfolio
- aggressive IC design cycle, to meet precise market windows
- State of the art EDA and Design Flow methodology
- Low design risks thanks to platform based design approach (Accent's XSeed) using ARM embedded cores, and thanks to Professional Project Management
- Unparalleled alliance network with first-class IP providers and Foundries, enabling Accent to offer a one-stop-shop service
Target markets
Multimedia, Telecom, Security, Wireless, Networking, Automotive, Industrial, RFID
Accent's customer portfolio is composed by:
- large companies (e.g. IDM, OEM) looking for specific microelectronic expertise and design capacity
- small and medium high tech companies (Fabless, Chipless, Start-ups) looking for design and/or manufacturing services for their ICs
- non electronic companies who wish to innovate their products with custom microelectronics ICs, and need turnkey service from electronic system definition through to parts delivery
Company History with ARM
Overview
ARM is recognised by Accent and Accent's customer as market leader and de-facto standard for embedded IP solutions.
Having grown to be a centre of excellence for ARM based SoC modelling, integration and validation methodologies, Accent has had the opportunity to increase its business and to build a first-class brand with IDMs and fabless customers for ARM based solutions.
Today, Accent has successfully carried out many projects and certified dozens of ARM/AMBA compliant IPs that can offer its customers the advantage of an ARM based system architecture truly optimised to the target application, of early availability of virtual prototypes or board prototypes to be used as proof of concept or demonstrators, of the easy introduction of customers changes, and above all of the high confidence that the system fully works first time and really matches the customer expectations.
How long has the company been working with ARM?
Accent started working on ARM technology in 1998. Since then, Accent has designed dozens of ARM-based SoCs, from architecture partitioning/definition to SOC tape-out, through implementation of AMBA-based IPs platforms, hardening of ARM cores, coding and porting of embedded SW, device bring -up through fast-prototyping and SOC manufacturing in qualified factories. All projects were first-time working systems with different ARM cores.
How the company works with ARM as a licensee?
As part of the STMicroelectronics' group and as direct licensee, Accent has licensed several ARM cores and Primecells to customers, the latest being the 7TDMI, the 926 and the 1136.
Specialist area as an ARM partner
Accent has been an ATAP partner since 2000 and has developed deep experience in the design of SoC integrating ARM cores and Primecell IP around AMBA busses. The architectures Accent has conceived have been optimised toward the best trade-off between performance and low power consumption.
Moreover, Accent has developed a comprehensive low power design methodology that exploits each opportunity at each design phase to reduce power consumption, from optimisation at system/architectural level through to layout design. The techniques used in the system design were described in a series of seminars that Accent held in 2003 in UK, France, Germany, Italy, Israel, together with ARM and TSMC. The title of the seminars was "Partnering to solve the low power challenge". Recently a co-development activity with ARM and Cadence has explored a methodology to apply the Voltage Scaling technique to power islands in an industrial IC, to reduce power consumption ("Accent, ARM and Cadence Collaborate To Improve Low-Power Design" - Companies validate low-power design techniques from architecture through implementation to enable 40% power reduction - Jul 26th 2005 - http://www.arm.com/news/9887.html). Several co-marketing actions are in progress to spread the results of this activity.
What experience comes to mind in the early years of working with ARM?
Thinking back to 1998, the first project embedding ARM technology really seems to belong to another technology era!
It was a Multimedia controller for car infotainment, full system concept and design on behalf of STMicroelectronics for an American customer. It embedded an ARM7TDMI engine, an optical interface and a memory bus plus APB based communication architecture. It was a first time silicon success, and the result strongly encouraged us.
A really huge difference in complexity exists with respect to our most recent and complex ARM SoC design: a dual processor (ARM926 plus DSP) system, with multi-layer AMBA architecture, for UMTS base stations! The system also included several state-of-the-art IP like embedded FPGA, Convolution Decoder Engine, embedded DRAM, external memory controllers with DDR SDRAM support, several A/D and D/A converters and I/O interfaces such as Ethernet MACs and HDLC Controllers.
ARM technology Accent supports
- Integration of ARM7TDMI, ARM720, ARM946, ARM926, ARM1136 cores and related peripherals (e.g. ETM, FPU etc)
- Integration of all the PrimeCell peripherals
- ARM core hardening service
- AMBA bus based communication architectures, both in single layer and multilayer configuration
- Prototyping on ARM's FPGA-based development board and validation tools (e.g. RealView Integrator family)
- ARM SW development suite
- Derivative designs from the ARM 926 PrimeXsys platform
- Accent's XSeed platform: a flexible, scalable platform with several HW/SW components and development scripts, built around AMBA busses and ready for integration of ARM CPUs, Primecells , and other I/O peripherals. XSeed offers a pre-verified basis to reduce the design cycle and risks for new products, and is ready for customization according to customer's needs.
Product Overview
Products that Accent/ARM technology are being shipped with
We're currently shipping in volume a multimedia product for consumer application (an audio/video processing engine), that embeds an ARM926. Accent has been responsible for the CPU integration, tape-out and is managing the foundry and the supply chain for volume production.
Moreover we're finalizing an agreement with industry leaders for the design and production of wireless products using the 1136 and 7TDMI cores.
Services in detail
IC Design core services
- IC Specification, Architecture and Planning
- Digital Design
- Analog and Radio-Frequency Design
- IC Integration and Verification
- Physical Design
- Ancillary Design services
- IP Services
- Prototyping
- Embedded Software Design
- Physical Technology Services
- Consulting Services
Supply Chain Management Services (SCMS)
- HW and SW IP Procurement
- Silicon Manufacturing (prototype, preproduction, volume)
- IC Packaging
- IC Assembly and Testing
- Planning & Logistics Services
Product Realisation Services
- Concept Design of IC-enabled Products
- Technology Integration and Assembly Services
Projects
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