ACADEMIA

ATLANTA, GA -- In the continual endeavor to improve the efficiency of compiled code, Agere Systems (NYSE: AGR.A) and Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector (NYSE: MOT), today announced the StarCore SC100 C Compiler benchmark testing results of the latest release of StarCore software development tools. This release has been shown to improve control code density an average of 45% over the previous release of the already highly efficient compiler, according to Roger Bringmann, Director of Software Development Tools for the StarCore Technology Center. "StarCore's SC100 C Compiler is a leader in improving control code density coupled with an architecture that's already proven its ability to deliver low cycle count and high performance for DSP code," said Bringmann. "We are proud to be providing Agere, Motorola and their respective end customers with this advanced development tools technology to enable faster time-to-market." Superior code density can help reduce the amount of memory needed on the DSP system-on-chip (SoC) and therefore help reduce overall silicon cost. "Since the control code typically encompasses up to 80% of the lines of code in many digital signal processor (DSP) applications, it is critical for the compiler to deliver tight code," added Bringmann. "The benchmarking material on the latest release of the StarCore SC100 C Compiler significantly outperforms competing 32- and 16-bit DSP cores, as well as demonstrates code density advantages over key market leading microcontrollers." The measurements were performed using Motorola's Powerstone suite composed of 14 control code benchmarks that include applications such as DES, JPEG, and V42.bis. These applications are representative of typical applications run on a microcontroller. The code density results for these benchmarks were measured using the latest StarCore Tools Set and compared with the best possible code density that could be produced using all optimization levels for each of the competitors' compilers. As expected, the StarCore Tools Set code density results were significantly better than the measured DSPs, but also smaller than the market's leading embedded microcontroller. DSP's -- 248% smaller than the 32-bit TI C64xx (version 4.0 tools) -- 41% smaller than the 16-bit TI C55x (version 2.0 tools) Microcontroller -- 19% smaller than the ARM(R) Thumb microcontroller (version SDT2.5 tools) The SC100 compiler solution provides the ability to produce "smaller than microcontroller" code density for control code. The parallelism in the SC140 architecture provides the cycle efficiency needed for the performance intensive DSP kernels. "Software developers can rely on the SC100 compiler solution to help reduce time-to-market while still meeting their performance and cost targets," said Bringmann. "The Metrowerks CodeWarrior(R) or Agere Systems' LuxWorks(TM) tools provide powerful software development environments that incorporate this technology." StarCore released the production 2.0 version of the SC100 compiler to Agere Systems and Motorola in June 2001. Complete software tool suites are provided by each company and are announced with their respective products. For more information visit www.starcore-dsp.com