Cray Research Inc has proved such a good customer over the years to Motorola Inc that it is getting early access to the Schaumberg, Illinois company’s next generation M5 process technology and is licensed to use it in a new pilot wafer fab it is building in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. The agreement is with Motorola’s Application Specific Integrated Circuits Division and is characterised as a multi-million dollar ASIC development partnership on chip technologies and manufacturing capabilities to support product introductions into the next century. The agreement covers immediate delivery of 50,000-gate, four-layer metal bipolar arrays and early access to the 0.5-micron BiCMOS technologies. Motorola reckons it gets something out of the agreement too: Cray will contribute system design, packaging experience and direction for future chip process technology. Cray is applying Motorola’s manufacturing knowledge to construct and operate the new fabrication line, which will be an 8 sub-Class-1 facility, which is scheduled to start process equipment installation later this year. It will have five times the capacity of Cray’s current 4 pilot line and will enable Cray to fabricate half-micron features in CMOS and BiCMOS gate arrays and memories. Under the agreement both parties will be able to process Cray-designed base arrays using Motorola’s 0.8-micron Mosaic V bipolar process. Custom CPU and memory management chips are destined for Cray’s supercomputer systems targeted for shipment in the mid-1990s. The M5 technology to which Cray gets early access – it will not start appearing in Motorola parts until next May, is a 0.5-micron embedded CMOS/BiCMOS/Bipolar array technology and enables any combination of high-performance CMOS and bipolar modules on the same die. Three and four layer metal are options for signal routing and power distribution. Densities exceeding 100,000 ECL gates or 1m CMOS gates are very practical. It enables fully diffused functions, such as memory, to be embedded in fixed die sizes for ease of manufacturing, Cray said.
