Alliance targets Chinese audio chip designers

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Dec 20, 2005

A design services partnership with Global Unichip Corp will speed time to market for Greater China's increasing number of fabless startup companies attacking the high-growth digital audio IC market.

ARC International has entered into a comprehensive design services partnership with Global Unichip Corp (GUC), a full-service SoC design company and TSMC partner, that will speed time to market for Greater China's increasing number of fabless startup companies attacking the high-growth digital audio IC market.

As an element of the partnership, GUC will provide ARC sound subsystem licensees a range of services from creating silicon based on customers' design specifications, to providing back-end layout of RTL and supplying a hardened implementation of the subsystem.

The ARC Sound subsystem will be part of the GUC intellectual property (IP) library and available to its customers but sold by ARC's sales force.

The GUC partnership is ARC's latest initiative to bring configurability to Asia, and augments the company's growing network of design services, sales and marketing capabilities in the region that are feeding the increasing appetite for ARC's patented configurable cores and subsystems.

"As Taiwan's leading SoC design services company, we are delivering needed solutions in ways that solve tight time-to-market requirements and short development windows", said Jim Lai, President and COO of Global Unichip Corp.

"With ARC we have a partner that can help agile, venture-backed startup companies get their digital audio designs into silicon quickly".

"We are pleased to have the premier design services company choose ARC as their premier provider of configurable SoC technology", says Derek Meyer, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing.

"The Taiwan semiconductor market is transitioning from technology manufacturing to product innovation and manufacturing".

"Our configurable cores and application-specific subsystems have hit the sweet spot in high-growth markets, such as digital audio, and we're fortunate to have one of the largest design services companies help us serve our growing customer base".