Intrinsity, based here, is a 55-person company that has spent the last decade developing design tools and circuit techniques aimed at high-performance logic, combining dynamic with static logic. Intrinsity’s "Fast 14" technology will be used by the AMCC-Intrinsity design team to reach performance in the 3-GHz range, said Mike Becker, vice president of engineering at Intrinsity.

Brian Wilkie, an AMCC vice president, said the PowerPC core will be used in system-on-chip solutions aimed at telecom control plane and storage systems. The convergence of voice, video and data-over-IP networks is creating a need for "more compute power at every node of the network," said Wilkie, who earlier managed PowerPC operations at Motorola’s semiconductor products sector. Among other duties, Wilkie manages an Austin-based 15-person AMCC design team.

Two years ago, AMCC bought several PowerPC cores from IBM Corp. Wilkie said the fastest core now available from AMCC is in the 800-MHz range. He declined to say when the 3-GHz core will be available.

Becker said Intrinsity is working with several other unidentified companies to apply Fast 14 technology to their designs. Two years ago, Intrinsity and graphics chip vendor ATI signed a technology licensing agreement to convert an existing ATI graphics chip to higher speeds, using a mix of dynamic and static logic, he said.

By: DocMemory
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