Array features more than 1million asic gates
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Mixed signal asic supplier, Triad Semiconductor has announced the availability of its largest configurable array to date, the VCA-6.
It features more than 1million asic gates on a single device and has been developed to enable designers to sweep up an entire board of components into a single asic.
The VCA-6 is fabricated on IBM's 0.18µ 7RF process optimised for mixed signal performance and digital integration. The device has onshore fabrication and a complete ITAR design and supply chain. Suitable for defence, applications said to benefit from integration onto a VCA-6 include: software defined radio, sonar, smart sensor fusion, fpga plus analogue replacement, UAV controllers and designs needing obsolescence or end of life replacement solutions.
"Size, weight and Power, or SWaP, are mission critical concerns for designers in the military, aerospace, industrial and portable medical markets," said Reid Wender, vice president of marketing at Triad Semiconductor. "The VCA-6 enables designers to replace power hungry fpgas and an entire board full of discrete analogue parts with a lower power, single chip solution."
The VCA-6 contains 320 configurable logic tiles. Each tile contains 3150 NAND2 equivalent asic gates providing the array with a total of 1,008,000 asic gates. Unlike fpgas, VCA-6 logic gates are not 'equivalent system gates' but actual standard cell gate primitives providing the size, performance, and power profile typical of a standard cell digital asic implementation.
Each logic tile also contains a 4608bit 2 port static RAM organised as 128 words by 36bits. The array also contains a total of 160 Kbytes of via configurable non volatile ROM arranged as 160 1K x 8 ROMs. The distributed RAM and ROM resources can be configured into larger composite memories using Triad's ViaWare memory generator.
The VCA-6 has over 100 op amps with each op amp surrounded by configurable collections of resistors, capacitors, transistors, and switches. The analogue resources are arranged into single ended analogue tiles, fully differential analogue tiles, resistive c/a converter tiles, bias tiles, and current steering d/a converter tiles. A single Via-Only mask layer change configures and interconnects these analogue and digital resources into a range of mixed signal circuits.
