Intrinsity
Encyclopedia
Intrinsity was a privately held Austin, Texas
based fabless semiconductor company
; it was founded in 1997 as EVSX on the remnants of Exponential Technology
and changed its name to Intrinsity in 2000. It has around 100 employees and supplies tools and services for highly efficient semiconductor
logic
design, enabling high performance microprocessor
s with fewer transistor
s and low power consumption. The acquisition of the firm by Apple Inc. was confirmed on April 27, 2010.
and novel signal encodings to permit greater processor speeds in a given process than naive static design can offer.
Concepts used in Fast14 are described in a white paper: they include the use of multi-phase clocks which mean that synchronisation is not required at every cycle boundary (that is, a pipelined design does not require latches at every clock cycle); 1-of-N
encoding where a signal with N states is carried as a voltage on one of N wires with the other N-1 grounded, rather than being carried on log(N) wires which can be in arbitrary states; and a variety of sophisticated routing algorithms including ones which permute the order of the wires in a bundle carrying a 1-of-N signal in such a way as to reduce noise exposure, and ones which allow complicated gates to 'borrow' delay from simple ones to allow a shorter clock cycle than a more pessimistic design approach permits. Converters between the two signal encodings are readily available, and are useful for interfacing to blocks of static logic.
This technology has been used to implement ARM
, MIPS and Power Architecture
cores, which Intrinsity licences under the name of FastCores; the first implementation was FastMATH, a MIPS
-based DSP
-like microprocessor implemented in 130 nm technology and introduced in 2002. It operates at 15 W power at 2.0 GHz and 1 V, and 6 W power at 1 GHz and 0.85 V; it was awarded Best Extreme Processor in 2003 by Microprocessor Report. The design took 16 months by a team of 45 engineers.
In July 2009, Intrinsity announced that it had developed in collaboration with Samsung a 1 GHz implementation of the ARM Cortex-A8 chip; it had developed a similar high-speed implementation of the Cortex-R4 chip two years earlier.
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
based fabless semiconductor company
Fabless semiconductor company
A fabless semiconductor company specializes in the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing the fabrication or "fab" of the devices to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry...
; it was founded in 1997 as EVSX on the remnants of Exponential Technology
Exponential Technology
Exponential Technology was a vendor of PowerPC microprocessors. The company was founded by George Taylor and Jim Blomgren in 1993. The company's plan was to use BiCMOS technology to produce very fast processors for the Apple Computer market. Logic used 3-level ECL circuits while RAM structures...
and changed its name to Intrinsity in 2000. It has around 100 employees and supplies tools and services for highly efficient semiconductor
Semiconductor
A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity due to electron flow intermediate in magnitude between that of a conductor and an insulator. This means a conductivity roughly in the range of 103 to 10−8 siemens per centimeter...
logic
Logic gate
A logic gate is an idealized or physical device implementing a Boolean function, that is, it performs a logical operation on one or more logic inputs and produces a single logic output. Depending on the context, the term may refer to an ideal logic gate, one that has for instance zero rise time and...
design, enabling high performance microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
s with fewer transistor
Transistor
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. It is composed of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current...
s and low power consumption. The acquisition of the firm by Apple Inc. was confirmed on April 27, 2010.
Products
Intrinsity's main selling point is its Fast14 technology, which is a set of design tools, implemented in custom EDA software, for using dynamic logicDynamic logic (digital logic)
In integrated circuit design, dynamic logic is a design methodology in combinatorial logic circuits, particularly those implemented in MOS technology. It is distinguished from the so-called static logic by exploiting temporary storage of information in stray and gate capacitances...
and novel signal encodings to permit greater processor speeds in a given process than naive static design can offer.
Concepts used in Fast14 are described in a white paper: they include the use of multi-phase clocks which mean that synchronisation is not required at every cycle boundary (that is, a pipelined design does not require latches at every clock cycle); 1-of-N
One hot
In digital circuits, one-hot refers to a group of bits among which the legal combinations of values are only those with a single high bit and all the others low . For example, the output of a decoder is usually a one-hot code, and sometimes the state of a state machine is represented by a...
encoding where a signal with N states is carried as a voltage on one of N wires with the other N-1 grounded, rather than being carried on log(N) wires which can be in arbitrary states; and a variety of sophisticated routing algorithms including ones which permute the order of the wires in a bundle carrying a 1-of-N signal in such a way as to reduce noise exposure, and ones which allow complicated gates to 'borrow' delay from simple ones to allow a shorter clock cycle than a more pessimistic design approach permits. Converters between the two signal encodings are readily available, and are useful for interfacing to blocks of static logic.
This technology has been used to implement ARM
ARM architecture
ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. It was named the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that, the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in numbers produced...
, MIPS and Power Architecture
Power Architecture
Power Architecture is a broad term to describe similar RISC instruction sets for microprocessors developed and manufactured by such companies as IBM, Freescale, AMCC, Tundra and P.A. Semi...
cores, which Intrinsity licences under the name of FastCores; the first implementation was FastMATH, a MIPS
MIPS architecture
MIPS is a reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies . The early MIPS architectures were 32-bit, and later versions were 64-bit...
-based DSP
Digital signal processor
A digital signal processor is a specialized microprocessor with an architecture optimized for the fast operational needs of digital signal processing.-Typical characteristics:...
-like microprocessor implemented in 130 nm technology and introduced in 2002. It operates at 15 W power at 2.0 GHz and 1 V, and 6 W power at 1 GHz and 0.85 V; it was awarded Best Extreme Processor in 2003 by Microprocessor Report. The design took 16 months by a team of 45 engineers.
In July 2009, Intrinsity announced that it had developed in collaboration with Samsung a 1 GHz implementation of the ARM Cortex-A8 chip; it had developed a similar high-speed implementation of the Cortex-R4 chip two years earlier.
Customers
- ATIAtiAs a word, Ati may refer to:* Ati, a town in Chad* Ati, a Negrito ethnic group in the Philippines* Ati-Atihan Festival, an annual celebration held in the Philippines* Ati, a queen of the fabled Land of Punt in Africa...
– for reducing transistor count in GPUs. - AMCCApplied Micro Circuits CorporationApplied Micro Circuits Corporation is a fabless semiconductor company designing network and embedded Power Architecture , and server processor ARM , optical transport and storage solutions...
– for Power ArchitecturePower ArchitecturePower Architecture is a broad term to describe similar RISC instruction sets for microprocessors developed and manufactured by such companies as IBM, Freescale, AMCC, Tundra and P.A. Semi...
based designs reaching 3 GHz. - LSI CorporationLSI CorporationLSI Corporation is an electronics company based in Milpitas, California that designs semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in datacenters and mobile networks.-History:...
(then Agere SystemsAgere SystemsAgere Systems Inc. was an integrated circuit components company based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Spun out of Lucent Technologies in 2002, Agere was merged into LSI Corporation in 2007....
) – for high performance and low power macrocellMacrocell arrayA macrocell array is an approach to the design and manufacture of ASICs. Essentially, it is a small step up from the otherwise similar gate array, but rather than being a prefabricated array of simple logic gates, the macrocell array is a prefabricated array of higher-level logic functions such as...
design. - SamsungSamsungThe Samsung Group is a South Korean multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea...
- for high-speed, low power processor cores.