One of the missed opportunities at Inmos International Plc when it was owned by Thorn EMI Plc always seemed to be the fact that it never offered the Transputer as a standard cell building block for applications specific circuits – but then Inmos never had the investment of the parental commitment behind it to do all the things it would have liked to have done. All is changed under its new parent, SGS-Thomson Microelectronics NV, and Electronic World News reports that Inmos is currently reimplementing the T400 Transputer in the H-CMOS 4 process used by SGS-Thomson’s Innovative Silicon Technology semi-custom division, and will then decompose the microprocessor into cells with a view to being able to offer applications-specific Transputer-based parts in 1992. Also on the way is the first of the next generation H-series Transputers, the H1, which is being designed to deliver 100 MIPS – the Transputer is a RISC although very little play is made of the fact – and 20 MFLOPS. Fabricated in sub-micron CMOS the part will have a 50MHz clock, the part also uses superscalar and pipelined techniques to execute more than one instruction per cycle, but Inmos is not prepared to say more about it at this stage.
