ARC Cores Ltd., London, last week acquired 20-year-old tool vendor MetaWare Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition looks to strengthen ARC's ongoing development of its user-configurable 32-bit processor, as MetaWare will serve as ARC's software research and development center. The move is intended to address one of the nagging concerns of the burgeoning configurable processor market, namely the lack of mature design tools that support configurable processing technology.

“Potential competitors of ours might say 'I can do a configurable processor. I can do the hardware,' but, it turns out that's the easy part: the trick is in the compiler technology,” explained Jim Turley, ARC's vice president of marketing. “We've had professional tools from them (as a customer) for years, and now we have as professional a team as you can get.”

No changes are being planned for MetaWare's existing base of 28 employees, nor for its existing base of customers. “Part of their charm is that they support multiple processors like PowerPC, x86 and ARM, as well as ARC's,” Turley said. “In a perverse way, that's part of the charm: it gives them a view of a lot of different architectures, they're not narrow-minded.”

One of ARC's chief competitors in this space is Tensilica Inc., a Santa Clara-based provider of application-specific processor technology. The acquisition of MetaWare looks to further differentiate the two companies, according to Turley.

Meanwhile, Altera Corp., San Jose, will today announce availability of the ARC 32-bit configurable processor optimized for its APEX 20K family of programmable logic devices (PLDs).

The announcement marks the entrance of ARC into Altera's Megafunction Partner Program (AMPP). When executed in an APEX20K PLD , the user-configured processor can be integrated into system-on-a-chip designs to optimize performance, the companies said.

“The AAMP program streamlines our design process for system developers by allowing them to customize their processor and actually try it in the lab in just hours,” Turley said. “The ability to customize and iterate several times in a single day allows (them) to be absolutely certain they've crafted the ideal software engine for their system. Altera's silicon and ARC's flexible processor architecture make this happen.”

	Jim Turley, ARC Cores' vice president of marketing