In one of the strangest developments in what has long been a rather odd PowerPC alliance, a new San Jose company, Exponential Technologyw Inc has popped up cliaming to have a revolutionary BiCMOS design process that will enable it build PowerPC chips far faster than anything that IBM Corp or Motorola Inc have in the pipeline – and according to sister publication PowerPC News, the company is backed by Apple Computer Inc. It says it has negotiated rights to fabricate its own PowerPC chip – presumably with IBM, since IBM has surely not passed the right to license third parties to make PowerPCs on it its partners. Exponential is still in the early stages and does not see volume until early 1997 – but that its parts will offer twice the performance of CMOS for the same die size – possibly better. The first processor will be a functional equivalent of the PowerPC 604; and the company is being careful not to quote clock speeds, but one source outside the company was talking about 700MHz parts last month. Most of the logic circuitry will be bipolar, with CMOS used for the onboard cache. Exponential’s secret is in its implementation of BiCMOS technolgy: it creates small islands of CMOS on a predominantly bipolar chip and claims to have discovered a way to design bipolar circuitry that is the rough equivalent to CMOS in size and energy consumption. The company has no plans to license the technology out, and anyway, we’ve still got to prove it. It intends to sell its products on the merchant market, in competition with IBM and Motorola at the high end. It does not have its own chip fabrication plant, and is unwilling to divulge who will be making them, other than to say that the fab will be off-shore and the company isn’t a US one. The smart money has got to be on Hitachi Ltd, which already has some ill-defined deal to build PowerPC processors and has also been banging on about its innovative BiCMOS fabrication technology – but Hitachi’s was dotting islands of ECL round a mainly CMOS part (CI No 2,661).
