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February 16, 1999

ANALOG DEVICES BOOSTS SOFTWARE TEAM WITH TWO BUYS

By CBR Staff Writer

Analog Devices Inc, once the sleepiest of the four major digital signal processing companies, has acquired two technology firms in the wake of its joint development deal with Intel Corp signed earlier this month (CI No 3,591). Analog has acquired compiler pioneer Edinburgh Portable Compilers Ltd and Nashua, New Hampshire-based emulation company White Mountain DSP Inc, in a bid to add to the software development resources that support its core DSP chip manufacturing operations. While ADI isnÆt saying how much it spent on the two companies, it says the deals will add 100 staff, 80% of them engineers, to its team of software developers. The new engineers will stay in their current locations, joining existing teams in Boston and Bangalore, India. Edinburgh Portable Compilers made its name writing compilers for Unix machines in the mid-1980s, but more recently has been working with Intel Corp on debugger technology for the forthcoming 64-bit Merced line. ADI, which shifted from using GNU open source compilers over to EPC products two years ago for the compilers for its Sharc family of DSPs, gets the EPC C, C++ and Fortran compilers. It also gets compiler expertise which could be useful for its new TigerSharc chips, currently under development, which use complex instruction set scheduling techniques derived from a VLIW very long instruction word architecture (CI No 3,517). ADI, which says that DSP work currently accounts for around 10-15% of EPCÆs activities, says it will gradually boost that proportion up to around two-thirds, with the rest concentrating on the Merced compiler projects. Tools for other chips will be phased out over the next few years, though ADI says it will continue to support ongoing projects. White Mountain is the biggest supplier of emulators on any architectures, and shipped two-thirds of the emulators that shipped with processors from ADI’s biggest rival, Texas Instruments Inc, last year. Both acquisitions have been completed. Analog says that only itself and DSP market leader Texas Instruments are in the general purpose DSP marketplace, as the other two DSP giants -Motorola Inc and Lucent Technologies Inc, with their StarCore joint venture – only really only interested in the communications equipment market. It says software support is crucial to market growth, and that buying decisions now focus on the whole product line, not just the hardware.

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