RMI Corporation, formerly Raza Microelectronics, Inc., was a privately held

fabless semiconductor company Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclus ...

headquartered in

Cupertino Cupertino ( ) is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, directly west of San Jose on the western edge of the Santa Clara Valley with portions extending into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The population was 57,8 ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, which specialized in designing

system-on-a-chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memory ...

processors for

computer networking A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ma ...

(known as

network processor A network processor is an integrated circuit which has a feature set specifically targeted at the networking application domain. Network processors are typically software programmable devices and would have generic characteristics similar to gene ...

s) and consumer media applications.

History

Saiyed Atiq Raza had founded

NexGen NexGen (Milpitas, California) was a private semiconductor company that designed x86 microprocessors until it was purchased by AMD in 1996. NexGen was a fabless design house that designed its chips but relied on other companies for production. N ...

, which was acquired by

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

in 1996. Raza was AMD's president and chief operating officer in the late 1990s after the NexGen acquisition. He left AMD in 1999 and founded Raza Microelectronics, Inc. in 2002. In 2003, SandCraft Inc folded, and Raza acquired the rights to its intellectual property. Behrooz Abdi became president and CEO in November 2007, and Raza Microelectronics changed its name to RMI Corporation in December 2007. In January 2008 Raza settled with the US

Securities and Exchange Commission The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market ...

over an allegation of insider trading during 2006. RMI was not affiliated with Foundries Holdings, LLC, formerly known as Raza Foundries, Inc. Most of RMI's revenue came from its multi-core processor product line, which had major customers from China including Huawei, ZTE, and H3C. The China business of RMI was built from scratch by its co-founder Sunny Siu. In 2008, RMI merged with

NetLogic Microsystems NetLogic Microsystems, Inc. was a fabless semiconductor company that developed high performance products for data center, enterprise, wireless and wireline infrastructure networks. The company was founded in 1995 by Norman Godinho and Varad Srin ...

, which was acquired by

Broadcom Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wirel ...

in 2012.

Product lines

RMI had four product lines: three developed internally and one acquired. The XLR (introduced circa 2005) was a

multicore A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such a ...

, multithreaded CPU used for network processing. XLR

integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...

s had 2 to 8

MIPS architecture MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, ...

CPU cores, each extended to support 4 hardware threads. XLR processors included

HyperTransport HyperTransport (HT), formerly known as Lightning Data Transport, is a technology for interconnection of computer processors. It is a bidirectional serial/parallel high-bandwidth, low- latency point-to-point link that was introduced on April 2 ...

PCI-X PCI-X, short for Peripheral Component Interconnect eXtended, is a computer bus and expansion card standard that enhances the 32-bit PCI local bus for higher bandwidth demanded mostly by servers and workstations. It uses a modified protocol t ...

Gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use i ...

, and

IEEE floating point The IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic (IEEE 754) is a technical standard for floating-point arithmetic established in 1985 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The standard addressed many problems found in ...

unit per core and optionally

10 Gigabit Ethernet 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE, 10GbE, or 10 GigE) is a group of computer networking technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of 10 gigabits per second. It was first defined by the IEEE 802.3ae-2002 standard. Unlike previous Eth ...

interconnects.Alt URL
/ref> A 2.0 GHz clock rate for the XLP was announced in May 2009. The XLS was a smaller, lower-cost multicore multithreading MIPS-based CPU used for network processing. The XLS family had options with 1 or 2 CPU cores, each with 4 hardware threads; 2 to 8

interfaces or two 10-gigabit Ethernet interfaces; and 1 or 2

PCI-Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common mot ...

interfaces. The XLS processor was widely used in Huawei's LTE base stations. The Alchemy processor was originally developed by Alchemy Semiconductor, which was then purchased by AMD. This product line was purchased by RMI in 2006. The Alchemy processor is a low-power

with integrated graphics and signal processing, designed for media players and portable video devices.RMI Alchemy Au1200 Processor
accessed November 3, 2008 The Orion network interface chip was used to translate Gigabit Ethernet data traffic to

synchronous optical networking Synchronous optical networking (SONET) and synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) are standardized protocols that transfer multiple digital bit streams synchronously over optical fiber using lasers or highly coherent light from light-emitting diode ...

(SONET/SDH)

Optical Carrier Synchronous optical networking (SONET) and synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) are standardized protocols that transfer multiple digital bit streams synchronously over optical fiber using lasers or highly coherent light from light-emitting diode ...

OC-48 network links and back again, to connect

local area network A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger ...

s with

wide area network A wide area network (WAN) is a telecommunications network that extends over a large geographic area. Wide area networks are often established with leased telecommunication circuits. Businesses, as well as schools and government entities, us ...

circuits.{{Cite web , title= Orion Family , work= Product Brief , date= April 11, 2005 , url= http://www.razamicroelectronics.com/documents/Orion_Family_Product_Brief.pdf , url-status=dead , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061015222837/http://www.razamicroelectronics.com/documents/Orion_Family_Product_Brief.pdf , archive-date= October 15, 2006 , accessdate= June 24, 2013 RMI processors were used in router,

firewall Firewall may refer to: * Firewall (computing), a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts * Firewall (construction), a barrier inside a building, designed to limit the spre ...

, and

switch In electrical engineering, a switch is an electrical component that can disconnect or connect the conducting path in an electrical circuit, interrupting the electric current or diverting it from one conductor to another. The most common type of ...

products sold by other networking equipment vendors, and consumer electronics manufacturers.

References

Companies established in 2002 Fabless semiconductor companies 2002 establishments in California Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States