May 24, 2012 -- Cortus SA and MOSIS have announced the signing of a sales representative agreement. Under the agreement, MOSIS will offer the Cortus APS3R and associated peripherals to its customers. The deal will support the licensing of Cortus IP from design through prototyping to volume production with MOSIS.

The MOSIS MPW service allows multiple products to be fabricated on a shared mask set and silicon wafer; cost sharing is based on the area used by each design. Both integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) and fabless semiconductor companies use MPW services to reduce chip-development costs when they need a few tens of samples for evaluation. The service is equally cost-effective for low-volume production, typically up to 1,000 pieces of each device. When device evaluation is complete, migration to a dedicated wafer run for high-volume production is easily realized.

The agreement covers the APS3R 32-bit modern RISC microcontroller and Cortus peripherals. The peripherals include commonly used standard peripherals such as timers, counters, UARTs, GPIO, I2C and SPI as well as an Ethernet MAC, USB 2.0 device and USB 2.0 OTG module.

The ecosystem around the Cortus APS3R microcontroller core is rich and well developed, and it includes peripherals commonly used in embedded systems, bus bridges to ensure easy interfacing to other IP and system support and functions. A full development environment (for C and C++) is available, which can be customized and branded for final customer use.

Cortus is exhibiting at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2012 in San Francisco, Calif., at Booth #304.

MOSIS is exhibiting at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2012 in San Francisco, Calif. at Booth #1119.