From EETimes: Can you maintain a business after your top customer buys your technology and the engineering team that developed it? That's the question Arteris will attempt to answer after Qualcomm decided it liked the FlexNoc network-on-chip so much it bought the company -- or most of it.
Qualcomm acquired for an undisclosed sum the FlexNoc intellectual property and about 43 engineers in France working on it. The SoC maker agreed to give Arteris FlexNoc updates on "an agreed upon schedule and provide certain engineering support," a Qualcomm spokesman said.
The updates will support the existing Arteris pattern of quarterly updates responding to user requests and a major upgrade every three or four years, said K. Charles Janac, president of Arteris, which now consists of about 23 people including about six field application engineers.
Arteris gets an unlimited use license to its FlexNoc patents, now owned by Qualcomm, as well as access to the source code and the right to modify it as needed. The result is a unique model competitors are already questioning.
"I've never seen anything like this and I've been in five startups," said Janac in an interview at ARM Tech Con.
Archrival Sonics says without a dedicated engineering team the company will not be able to provide the kind of configuration and support SoC designers require. Janac says the agreement provides adequate access to Qualcomm engineers for support on terms he will not disclose.
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