Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Triad offers 1 million gates plus analog

LONDON - Triad Semiconductor Inc, whose via-configurablearrays offer programmable analog with a microcontroller, has announced theavailability of its largest configurable array to date, the VCA-6, with morethan one million ASIC gates.

The VCA-6 is fabricated on IBM's 0.18-micron 7RF process andmanufactured within the United States making the device suitable for defenseapplications, according to Triad (Winston-Salem, NC). The VCA-6 is suitable forapplications such as software defined radio, sonar, smart sensor fusion, FPGAplus analog replacement, unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV) controllers, Triadsaid.

The VCA-6 contains 320 configurable logic tiles. Each tilecontains 3,150 NAND2 equivalent ASIC gates providing the array with a total of1,008,000 ASIC gates. Unlike FPGAs, VCA-6 logic gates are not "equivalentsystem gates" but actual standard-cell gate primitives providing the size,performance, and power profile typical of a standard-cell digital ASICimplementation. Each logic tile also contains a 4,608-bit 2-port static RAMorganized as 128 words by 36-bits. The array also contains a total of 160-kbytesof via configurable non-volatile read-only memory (ROM) arranged as 160 1K x 8ROMs. The distributed RAM and ROM resources can be configured into largercomposite memories using Triad's ViaWareTM memory generator.

In addition the VCA-6 has more than 100 op-amps with eachop-amp surrounded by configurable collections of resistors, capacitors,transistors, and switches. The analog resources are arranged into single-endedanalog tiles, fully differential analog tiles, resistive DAC tiles, bias tiles,and current steering DAC tiles. A single via-only mask layer change configuresand interconnects these analog and digital resources into a wide range ofmixed-signal circuits.

"The VCA-6 enables designers to replace power-hungryFPGAs and an entire board full of discrete analog parts with a lower power,single chip solution," said Reid Wender, vice president of marketing atTriad Semiconductor, in a statement.

This story was originally posted by EE Times.
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Triad offers 1 million gates plus analog

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