LONDON — Silicon Hive BV (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) has signed a deal with giant chipmaker Intel Corp. allowing Intel to use Silicon Hive's technology in mobile products.

The terms of the licensing deal but are likely to have been wrapped up in association with a funding deal whereby Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of Intel, helped inject $7 million into Silicon Hive.

Silicon Hive, a spin off from Philips Research, licenses embedded parallel processor architectures, compilers, and programming tools to semiconductor manufacturers and OEMs. These parallel processors provide hardware acceleration for such applications as high-definition video processing and wireless communications.

As the mobile phone and mobile computer merge to form the mobile internet device (MID)Intel, with its Atom processor, is making a renewed effort to enter the mobile sector. A DSP-optimized inner-loop processor such as those available from Silicon Hive would round out Intel's offering.

Alternative cores and processors include the Embedded Vector Processor (EVP) from NXP (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) and the ADRES reconfigurable processor template from IMEC (Leuven, Begium), which comes with a compiler and a suite of multiprocessor design tools. IMEC recently announced that Toshiba had licensed the ADRES processor for use in 4G applications.

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