With the increasingly important role that third-party semiconductor IP (SIP) plays in advanced SoC designs, strengthening strategic partnership programs and building comprehensive ecosystems have become key competitive advantages for IP vendors to succeed in the market, so that they can provide licensees with complete solutions and help customers develop innovative products in the shortest time-to-market.
"Our IP fully supports a wide range of software drivers, development tools, and developer ecosystems", said Imagination Technologies, the top three SIP provider in the world. "It's an integral part of how we've built our IP solutions and also vital to Imagination's rapid growth in recent years."
According to a recent report from industry analyst firm Gartner, Imagination outpaced other competitors in 2012 with a YoY revenue growth rate of 36.4%, much higher than the 17.8% of average growth rate of top ten SIP vendors.
In order to respond to the escalating design challenges caused by advances of process technology and to drive continuous growth for the company, Imagination has been continuously expanding its already broad ecosystem of partners. This includes developing key partnerships with semiconductor foundries such as TSMC and GLOBALFOUNDRIES, as well as leading EDA tool vendors like Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor.
Furthermore, Imagination has broadened its third party support across all of its IP core families, encompassing operating systems, EDA and tool vendors, foundries, middleware and much more.
Imagination focuses on power, performance and area optimizations for its entire range of IP, including its industry-leading PowerVR GPUs, popular MIPS CPUs, and a range of other IP cores. As GPUs increasingly dominate next generation SoCs, and the options available to designers using advanced silicon processes become more complex, design flows and libraries need to be optimally tuned to enable design teams to achieve the best possible performance, power consumption and silicon area in ever more demanding timescales.
To address these challenges, Imagination is working closely with TSMC to develop highly optimized reference design flows and silicon implementations using Imagination's industry-leading PowerVR Series6 GPUs combined with TSMC's advanced process technologies, including 16-nanometer (nm) FinFET process technology.
This collaboration with TSMC has allowed Imagination to optimise its IP for the latest process technologies and resulted in significant PPA (power, performance, area) improvements using a range of techniques such as standard-cell library and memory macro optimisations.
Imagination Technologies is a leader in mobile GPU IP market. The company has been growing its PowerVR Insider developer program since 2006. PowerVR Insider has now become the most comprehensive mobile graphics ecosystem, with over 30,000 members to date, covering anything from game developers, middleware, advanced UI design, 3D navigation and video.
Foreseeing the trend that more multimedia and connectivity IP cores will be integrated into SoCs, Imagination will keep strengthening collaboration programs with its partners and further expand its SIP portfolios to be widely adopted by more consumer and networking applications. By doing so, Imagination will be able to help semiconductor licensees and OEM/ODMs to get the best benefits of using SIP and develop more differentiated products.
At the upcoming 2013 Imagination Summit, which will be held on June 26 and June 28 in Hsinchu and Taipei respectively, Imagination will introduce its complete SIP solutions in detail. Imagination's key partners TSMC and MediaTek will also deliver keynote speeches. To understand the latest SoC design and technology trends, as well as have interactions with Imagination's ecosystem partners, please don't miss this great opportunity! For more information please visit: http://www.digitimes.com.tw/seminar/imagination_20130626/
Imagination strengthens industry collaborations to build comprehensive ecosystem
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