Reprogrammable chips could rival fpgas says Tabula
1 min read
A cheaper, more powerful competitor to fpgas has been unveiled by startup Tabula. According to the programmable logic specialist, the reprogrammable design is considerably smaller than that of an fpga, so as well as reducing silicon costs, the device has a smaller surface so signals can traverse quicker and more efficiently. The chip design on demand could enable tvs and other devices to upgrade their own hardware.
Steve Teig, founder and chief technology officer of Tabula, said that the technology needed to build stacked, 3d chips is still restricted to research labs, so instead he found a way to make a chip with just one level behave as if it were eight different ones stacked up.
"Imagine you walked into the elevator in a building and then walked back out, and that I rearranged the furniture quickly while you were in there," he said. "You would have no way to tell you weren't on a different floor." Tabula's chips perform the same trick on the data they process, cycling between up to eight different layouts at up to 1.6billion times per second (1.6 Gigahertz). Signals on the chip encounter those different designs in turn, as if they were hopping up a level onto a different chip entirely. "From its behaviour, our [design] is indistinguishable from a stack of chips," added Teig, who calls the virtual chip layers 'folds'.
That brings speed advantages, because signals don't have to travel a long way across the surface of a chip to reach new part of circuit, as they do on an fpga. When the chip loads a new fold, new circuitry appears in place of the old. Teig claims that the footprint of a Tabula chip is less than a third of an equivalent fpga, making it five times cheaper to make, while providing more than double the density of logic and roughly four times the performance.
As with fpgas, Tabula's chips contain arrays of many identical basic building blocks that can be programmed to implement any logic function. A memory store on the chip manages the different configurations that the chip cycles through.
Making the reconfigurable approach cheaper could enable even consumer electronics to ship with programmable chips, making it possible for them to be upgraded with new design tweaks.
