Texas Instruments Inc appears to be the first company out with a family of seven big BiCMOS gate array products. The TGB1000 family boasts a member with 150,000 gates and each ASIC design incorporating one of these devices will, says Texas Instruments, typically consume only 10% more power than equivalent CMOS designs. Clive Hoggar, European ASIC divisional manager, says that these new devices will appeal to the designer of a system who wants high performance without the ECL powerstation approach. BiCMOS can be used to design smaller, lighter systems than can CMOS by using more gates but with less power dissipation. The technology enables people to design ASICs using BiCMOS technology up to 100,000 and more gates. Hoggar says that there has been a lot of interest in the product from people designing mid-range systems, workstations and personal computers as well as from companies in the telecommunications sector interested in high-speed data switching. Indeed, he added that several US and European computer companies have already switched to the technology to leapfrog a generation of product and provide more MIPS on the worktop. There are also possibilities for the use of such devices in laptops to offer a great deal more power than is currently available. When asked if the devices could be used to design a high performance CPU-type architecture such as RISC, Hoggar agreed that it could. He said that customers are effectively implementing CPU applications and Texas Instruments is providing a library data path to ease such implementations. Texas itself is designing products based on the TGB1000 and has developed a standard CPU chip known as Viking.
