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April 11, 1988

TWO GATE ARRAYS ARE NOT YET READY FOR THE APOLLO SERIES 1000

By CBR Staff Writer

Despite the confident launch of Apollo Computer’s Series 10000 at the beginning of last month, it turns out that two of the 10 CMOS gate arrays to be used in the systems had not yet been manufactured by the company’s applications-specific integrated circuit supplier at the time of the launch. Electronic News reports that Integrated CMOS Systems Inc of Sunnyvale, California expects to have the chips readi any day now: they are the register files that carry out calculations in conjunction with the floating point units on the Series 10000 processor board. Meanwhile Apollo insists that its performance ratings of up to 100 MIPS peak performance are based on valid tests, as the major processor components can be run independently of the register files, which are now said to be running at 100% in simulations. Apollo expects to ship the Series 10000 by mid-August, and says that the register files had a later design start than the other gate arrays. Integrated CMOS Systems was contracted by Apollo to design and implement the application specific subsystems for the new RISC-based workstations, said to be the first to achieve an execution rate of more than one instruction per cycle, due to the parallelisation among processors and the 64-bit architecture. Integrated CMOS included level sensitive scan design methods which allow built-in testability of the VLSI, high density CMOS gate arrays. For production of the integrated circuits, the company uses VLSI Technology in California, and Toshiba in Japan. Integrated CMOS implemented chips for five subsystems in the Series 10000: a RISC-based integer processor, a floating point register file, a memory manager, input-output manager, and graphics processor: these contain more than 10 different gate arrays with densities of 30,000 plus gates, and are implememented in 1.5 micron, dual-metal CMOS technology. Integrated CMOS Technology was founded in 1984 by a group of senior managers from Storage Technology Corp’s defunct STC Computer Research Corp, and has had $8m in venture capital funding.

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