Situation
Imagination Technologies develops and licenses silicon and software IP for today's multimedia and communication devices. The company offers an expanding range of complementary IP cores, licensed by many of the world's leading silicon device suppliers including Intel, Renesas, Samsung, Sharp and TI.
To remain a leader in this highly competitive industry, Imagination must continually deliver optimal implementations of their IP cores, which are dominated by datapath functionality.
Solution
Imagination Technologies is one of Arithmatica’s major customers and also is a commercial partner. Imagination’s engineers use CellMath Designer to optimize the datapath sections of their IP cores. Arithmatica also provides outsourced design services and CellMath IP to augment their internal development group. As a commercial partner, Arithmatica provides an optimization tool called CellMath Optimizer to Imagination Technologies customers that allow them to target their IP cores to different manufacturing processes and libraries.
Results
Imagination Technologies has become the leader in several key markets, one of which is mobile multimedia solutions. Its family of POWERVR cores has become the de facto standard for mobile 3D hardware acceleration, with over 15 SoCs committed by its licensee partners for mobile handsets. These SoCs will deliver graphics performance several times that of current 3D enabled handsets.
Client Perspective
"Imagination Technologies provides advanced mobile graphics processor IP. We gained double benefit from Arithmatica's datapath design tools, using CellMath Designer in the design phase of our POWERVR SGX shader architecture to lower area and power, and using CellMath Optimizer to deliver our IP so that our licensees can optimize silicon-efficiency and performance in their target process technology. Overall, we reduced die area significantly as well as ensured aggressive performance targets were met."
Martin Ashton, General Manager, PowerVR Business Unit
