Power Architecture - Licensing

Licensing

The Power Architecture is open for licensing by third parties. Licensees can choose to license anything from a single predefined core, to a complete new family of Power Architecture products.

IBM licenses hard (predefined chip designs) and soft (synthesized design that can be used in different foundries) core implementations of both the 32-bit and 64-bit Power Architecture, either directly or through Power Design Center partners such as HCL Technologies or Synopsys. On a strategic basis, IBM also provide both microarchitecture and architecture licenses. A microarchitecture license enables licensees to implement a new pipeline for a core, but not to add or subtract instructions from the Power Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). Microarchitecture licenses cover both 64-bit and 32-bit, although individual licenses are available if necessary/desired.

IBM has announced plans to make the specifications of the PowerPC 405 core freely available to the academic and research community.

In April 2007 Freescale and IPextreme opened up the PowerPC e200 cores for licensing to other manufacturers.

Companies that have developed or are developing their own processors based on the Power Architecture under license include Tundra Semiconductor, Applied Micro Circuits Corporation, HCL Enterprise, Culturecom, P.A. Semi, Xilinx, Microsoft, Rapport, Sony, Honeywell, Toshiba and Cray.