Vitesse Semiconductor Corp of Camarillo, California has upped the ante in the Gallium Arsenide stakes with a 30,000-gate GaAs array that brings the technology right down into the realm of RISC microprocessors – the original implementation of the Sun Microsystems Sparc took only 20,000 gates. The VSC30K is aimed at high-speed computer, telecommunication and defence applications, and can be used in air-cooled systems, the company claims. The new part features 30,528 2-input NOR gates with 100% gate usage and typical power dissipation for the device is 8W to 12W. It comes in a 344-pin leaded chip carrier, with 256 signal pins configurable to ECL, TTL and GaAs input-output levels. Vitesse currently has over 20 VSC30K designs in progress and new design inputs are being accepted now: prototype shipments are set for January 1990. All members of the Fury gate arrays are included in the second source pact announced with Fujitsu Ltd last month. Pricing ranges from 3 cents to 5 cents per gate for commercial grade versions of parts built on the array.
