Small Gate Count and High Performance
Key to AndesCore N801 Winning Weltrend Design
Andes Technology Inc. the leader in developing easy to integrate, scalable, and configurable CPU intellectual property (IP) and platforms today announced that Weltrend Semiconductor, a leading fabless semiconductor company has adopted the AndesCore N801CPU IP for a new system on chip (SoC) targeting the expanding brushless DC motor (BLDC) controller market. The N801’s small gate count—less than 14k gates—and high performance—1.36 DMIP/MHz at 300MHz operating frequency—beat out competitive alternatives to win the business.
Saving die area with a small gate count while providing high performance provides Weltrend’s SoC a competitive advantage as it competes for a large share of the booming electric motor control market. “The worldwide market for electric motors is expected to be worth an estimated US$120.68 billion by 2019, growing at a 6.3 percent compound annual growth rate from 2013 to 2019,” predicted the market research report titled “Electric Motors Market (AC motors, DC motors, Hermetic motors) – Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast, 2013 – 2019,” from Transparency Market Research.
“Electric motors have a wide area of applications in numerous industries and functions such as motor vehicles, household appliances, industrial machinery, aerospace and other transportation equipment, HVAC equipments, and commercial industry,” the report claims. Furthermore, the research asserts that growth is greatest in Weltrend’s home market. “Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing and largest regional market for electric motors owing to improving economies and rising purchasing power in countries such as India, Malaysia, China, and Indonesia.”
“Andes has been a valued supplier of CPU IP since 2009,” said Chao-Chee Ku, Ph.D., Director of Product Planning & FAE of Weltrend. “Andes has continually provided Weltrend the high quality technical support we need to design best-in-class system-on-chip solutions for our customers. Andes’ N801 CPU core helped Weltrend fulfills the market needs as well as our customers’ requirements.”
“AndesCore processor families are based on a young architecture developed in the last 10 years with emerging market requirements in mind,” said Frankwell Lin, President of Andes. “Not bound by the need to remain compatible by years of applications, Andes developed a product line of high performance, small size, and low power CPU cores including the N801 with its 3-stage pipeline design. These cores boosts the execution efficiency of today’s computation algorithms, reduces memory usage, lowers customers’ silicon cost, while providing a long-term roadmap for customers needing an upgrade path from 8-bit cores used up to now.”
About Weltrend Semiconductor
Weltrend Semiconductor is a leading fabless semiconductor company, based in Hsinchu, Taiwan, specializing in the planning, design, testing, application development and distribution of its IC products. The company is a leading developer of analog and mixed-signal/digital IC design. It has accumulated enormous technical expertise over the years with a rich digital/analog IP portfolio and has expanded its products to advanced applications spanning across video signal processing, high-efficiency BLDC motor control, data security, vital sign detection, and digital power.
