DesignCon’s unfolding in Silicon Valley all week. Among the many companies exhibiting there, IP provider CAST and its IP core development partner Beyond Semiconductor are enjoying a particularly excellent experience. When I stopped in at CAST’s booth on the DesignCon floor for a brief chat with company CEO Hal Barbour this afternoon, he told me his company’s revenue numbers for January 2013 alone are set to outpace CAST’s total first-quarter revenues from 2010, 2011, or 2012.

Given the energy and attendance swirling about us at DesignCon, Barbour’s impressive financials were not a complete surprise – Silicon Valley is back – but a revitalized revenue stream is not the only reason CAST is enjoying a lot of traffic in their booth this week. More it’s because CAST and Beyond Semiconductor have chosen this time and place to announce yet another member of their family of 32-bit processor cores targeting embedded applications.

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