Company Overview
Company History
Aurora VLSI, Inc. is a privately held company that was founded in 1998 by Joan Pendleton, PhD and Ravi Reddy with the charter to develop and market semiconductor products that optimize JavaTM performance for mobile and fixed internet appliances, internet servers, and consumer home appliances.
Company's Primary Business Model
Aurora VLSI's primary business model is IP core licensing and supporting services. Several levels of integration are available in our IP cores- standalone peripherals, subsystems that include DMA plus an AMBA Bus interface, and customer configurable SOC platforms consisting of a complete AMBA Bus system and industry standard components to which the customer adds their proprietary technology and one or more ARM processor cores. Customization services for all our IP products, integration services, and new IP core development upon customer demand are also available. The goal is to provide anything a customer needs that relates to IP that they license from Aurora. Company Objective
Aurora VLSI provides silicon IP cores, subsystems, and SOC platforms. This includes:
Peripherals such as Ethernet, PCI, USB, IEEE 1394
Memory controllers such as SDRAM, DDR, SRAM, flash, compact flash
DMA engines
AMBA Bus components such as bridges, slave, master, arbiters, decoders
Support functions such as interrupt controller, timers, counters, UART, GPIOs, PWMs, SPI, reset controller
AMBA SOC platforms- configurable bus systems and peripherals
All are available with AMBA AHB Bus interfaces and/or AMBA APB Bus interfaces. Versions with AIX Bus interfaces are in development.
Company Offerings
Aurora VLSI's IP cores and subsystems with AMBA Bus interfaces include: - DRAM Controller - SDRAM Controller - DDR Controller - DDR2 Controller - Combined Memory Controller
- SRAM Controller - SRAM Controller - Combined Memory Controller
- Flash Controller - Flash Controller- NAND and NOR - Combined Memory Controller
- Compact Flash Controller
- XD Controller
- On Chip SRAM
- DMA Engine- 1 to 8 channels
- Ethernet - Ethernet 10/100 - Ethernet 10/100/1000
- PCI - 32 bit PCI - 64 bit PCI - 32 bit PCI and CardBus - PCI Express
- USB - USB 1.1 Device - USB 2.0 Device - USB 2.0 On The Go (OTG)
- IEEE 1394 - IEEE1394a - IEEE 1394a + OHCI 1.2 - IEEE 1394b - IEEE 1394b + OHCI 1.2
- Utopia
- Timers/Counters - 32 bit Timer - 64 bit Timer - Watchdog Timer - Free running counter - Event counter - Other popular configurations
- Interrupt Controller
- UARTs
- SPI
- PWMs
- GPIOs
- Reset Controller
AMBA Bus components and systems products are:
AMBA AHB Arbiter
AMBA AHB Decoder
AMBA AHB Master
AMBA AHB Slave
AMBA AHB/APB Bus Bridge
AMBA AHB/AHB Bus Bridge
Multilayer AMBA AHB Interconnect
Configurable AMBA SOC Platforms
What is unique about your company's offerings?
All our engineers- product development and services engineers are senior engineers with years of extensive AMBA Bus, systems, high performance, and high complexity experience.
Additionally, Aurora closely matches services engineers to each IP licensee so that each licensee's support, customization, and development needs are met.
IP core development and support is Aurora's primary business and core (no pun intended) competency, as opposed to a side business or one of several business units. Aurora is committed to rapid customer response by senior engineers. To summarize, Aurora VLSI is a semiconductor engineers' company- built by semiconductor engineers and dedicated to serving semiconductor engineers.
Target markets?
Aurora VLSI targets any and all semiconductor companies with its wide variety of silicon IP.
Company History with ARM
ARM technologies your company supports:
Aurora VLSI supports ARM's AMBA Bus technology. Over half of Aurora's IP products have AMBA Bus interfaces.
Why have you chosen to work with ARM?
We chose to work with ARM for several reasons: ARM processors are the highest volume processor IP cores. Therefore, their bus interface, the AMBA Bus, provides the largest volume opportunity for our peripherals IP products, as we chose a bus interface for our products.
We were impressed by the AMBA Bus technology. The AMBA AHB Bus is a robust, high performance on chip bus. It's pipelining provides performance. Its burst types, data sizes, and variable data widths accommodate a wide spectrum of applications and system requirements. A complete set of response types is available to meet system robustness requirements.
The AMBA Bus specification is detailed, complete, and well written; and open to the public.
Specialist area as an ARM Partner?
Our specialty as an ARM partner is the AMBA Bus- components that connect seamlessly to an AMBA Bus, and complete AMBA Bus systems with customer selected components.
How long has the company been working with ARM?
Aurora VLSI has been working directly with ARM for three years as a member of ARM's Connected Community. Aurora has also been an Artisan (now part of ARM) Partner for seven years.
Please site any end products that your ARM technology is being shipped with?
There are at least four wireless market chips and two video chips. There are probably more by now because some licenses are unlimited use licenses.
What one experience comes to mind during your early years of working with ARM?
We had an AMBA SOC platform customer that chose an ARM processor and AMBA Bus configuration that put an abnormally high stress on the single AMBA AHB Bus that they chose to use. This led to a funny, pathological situation of livelock that could happen under a certain set of conditions. It was a very non-trivial system problem. We developed a simple solution for it but needed to know some internal details of the ARM processor's AMBA Bus interfaces so that we could be sure the solution would *always* work. This required a dialog with the ARM designers in England. We received wonderful support from our local ARM Connected Community liaisons. They diligently pursued the issue to facilitate a discussion with the ARM designers. This led to an excellent discussion with the ARM people in England. We are very grateful for the time they devoted to this issue, the thoroughness of their understanding of this non-trivial systems issue, and their subsequent answers.
For more information on Aurora VLSI and the ARM Connected Community go to http://www.arm.com/community/
More information on Aurora VLSI can be found at http://www.auroravlsi.com
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