Two more companies offering analogue and mixed signal IP emerged at IP99.

Analogue and mixed signal circuitry is widely regarded as being so dependent on the details of the process on which it is to be manufactured that it is difficult, if not impossible, to transfer to a customer as a product rather than as a service.

But both Pivotal Technologies and ChipIdea want to enter the market for blocks of analogue IP using internally developed tools to ease the transfer between processes.

KC Murphy, chief executive of Pivotal Technologies, claims modern CMOS processes at the same minimum line widths are very similar so porting blocks between them is easier than it appears.

According to Erlend Olson, chief technology officer of Pivotal, the company has ported an 8bit analogue to digital converter to a new process in seven days. It has seven patents pending on techniques to isolate its analogue blocks from the rest of the circuitry on a chip.

ChipIdea of Lisbon, Portugal, is also trying to enter the market for analogue and mixed signal IP. It has been servicing foundries including ES2/Atmel and Austria Mikro Systeme, with its baseband codecs for wireless applications and converter designs. But it wants to go beyond using the foundries as a channel to market and address systems customers directly.

Joao Piteira, product manager at ChipIdea, says the company has been developing hard IP targeted at particular processes, but is trying to develop an internal tool to ease the shift between processes.

Jose Epifanio da Franca, president and chief executive, says the company is working on an ESPRIT project called RAPID to develop tools which help retarget a design between different applications.