Vitesse Semiconductor launches two new members in its FX range of GaAs gate arrays…
Vitesse Semiconductor Corp is smokin’. The Camarillo, California-based company, almost but not quite the only game in town when it comes to fabricating circuits in Gallium Arsenide, says that profits for its fiscal second quarter to March 30 on are target to soar 20-fold. It has a six-month backlog representing business worth $14m to $16m, representing about 80% of the total turnover it was expecting for the six months to June 29. Convex Computer Corp is an important source of business, accounting for about 25% of the $9m it expects this quarter – and if another Convex comes along any time soon, it will need a new plant. On the product front, the company has announced the VGFX20K and VGFX40K, two new members of its FX range of digital Gallium Arsenide gate arrays. The new arrays are intended to increase the number of applications addressable by the company’s flagship FX family of gate arrays, thus broadening the customer base available to the company. The new devices, which are targeted at high-performance applications in computers, communications and general instrumentation, are based on Vitesse 0.6-micron H-GaAs III manufacturing technology, which features a sea-of-gates architecture with four-layer metal routing for flexibility and efficiency. Vitesse claims they offer up to four times the speed performance available in competing silicon BiCMOS gate arrays. The company says a typical two-input NOR gate has a worst-case delay of 60 picoseconds (10 to the minus 12) – unloaded – while dissipating only 0.18 milliWatts of power; this results in a speed-power product of 11 femto-Joules, which the chip specialist maintains is significantly better than silicon BiCMOS at around 25fJ (at 100MHz) or silicon ECL at about 50fJ. The new FX20K and FX40K are aimed at high-speed digital functions such as fast cache and DRAM control, error detection and correction, bus control, signal processing, crosspoint or crossbar switching, and real-time data processing and control. With the two new arrays, the FX family now comprises five array offerings – 350,000; 200,000; 100,000; 40,000; and 20,000 raw gates. Maximum use of the arrays is around 50% of the available raw gates. Higher usage is possible through a custom master-slice option that enables incorporation of full-custom logic into the base array. Signal interfaces are configurable to ECL, TTL, or mixed ECL and TTL signal levels, and the devices use industry-standard power supplies. Package options for the FX20K include a 52-pin ceramic LDCC, 132-pin ceramic LDCC or pin grid array. The FX40K is available in a 184-pin ceramic pin grid array. For full optimisation, customers can choose to embed megacells such as random access memory, register files, or custom logic blocks in a base FX array. Read-only memory compiler technology is also supported for the FX family, speeding the design cycle for custom RAM blocks. In addition, skew of clock signals can be minimised through the use of a optimised clock distribution scheme made for each array in the family.
..samples VGFX350K GaAs ASIC device..
Vitesse says it has manufactured its first production samples of the VGFX350K 350,000-gate GaAs ASIC device, which it is heralding as another record in its achievements in Gallium Arsenide integration levels. According to the Californian chip specialist, this is the largest GaAs ASIC ever produced and helps to validate the Vitesse H-GaAs process technology. This application of the VGFX350K gate array incorporates two custom blocks of on-chip static RAM – 44K-bits each, two custom five-port register files and over 200,000 raw gates. According to the company, at over 1.2m active transistors out of 1.5m the device integrates roughly the same number of transistors used in Intel Corp’s 80486 or Motorola Inc’s 68040 microprocessors. A member of the FX family of gate arrays, the VGFX350K is based on Vitesse’s 0.6 micron H-GaAs III process technology. It has 378 ECL input-output signal buffers and is packaged in a plasti
c 557-pin grid array. The device has a maximum power dissipation of 44 Watts but typically dissipates less than 30 Watts. The static RAM and register files have a claimed access time of under 3.5nS, dissipating less than 4 Watts.
…announces Advanced Micro Devices’ G-TAXIchip set under five-year deal
Also new is the G-TAXIchip chip set, an enhanced version of Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s TAXIchip range, which boasts serial communication speeds up to 1.25G-bits per second. The devices, which are architected by Advanced Micro and implemented in Vitesse’s H-GaAs process, are targeted at high-speed public communications standards-based systems and user-customised links. The chip set provides a high-speed parallel-to-serial / serial-to-parallel data link intended to eliminate the data communications bottlenecks between electronic systems. It addresses applications for data transfer over various media including ANSI X3T9.3 Fibre Channel, a fibre optic point-to-point standard communicating at up to 1.06Gbps. It implements the transmission protocol – FC-1 – of the standard, which includes the serial encoding and decoding rules, special characters, and error control; Vitesse claims that the G-TAXIchip family can replace over 80 copper wires contained in two cables using just two fibre optic cables implementing a serial version of this parallel, duplex ANSI standard. The parts support the ANSI Fibre Channel using an ANSI 8B/10B patented transmission code. On-chip phase locked loop circuits enable the device to generate and recover clock signals, simplifying the interface with the host sending and receiving systems. These are the first products to materialise from a five-year agreement signed in April 1990 between Advanced Micro and Vitesse. The Sunnyvale company provided the specifications and Vitesse designs and fabricates the chips. Both companies have the rights to market and sell the chip set, which comprises four parts – a Multiplexer (VSC7103), a Demultiplexer (VSC7104), a Transmitter (VSC7101), and a Receiver (VSC7102). The Multiplexer and Transmitter work in concert to convert 32 or 40 lines of parallel data into serial data at 1.25 Gbps. The devices are shipping now and cost $1,000 per set from Vitesse. In quantities of over 1,000 the chips are $603 per set. Development boards are due at the end of March.
