SandCraft, Inc., was a

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...

based fabless semiconductor design company designer of microprocessors that were used as computing engines in electronics products utilizing the MIPS architecture and a series of

RISC In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set comput ...

CPU chips. The markets targeted were consumer electronics, office automation, and communications applications, including

Nintendo is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It develops video games and video game consoles. Nintendo was founded in 1889 as by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi and originally produce ...

game consoles. On 29 July 2003, SandCraft, Inc. was acquired by Raza Microelectronics Inc, which, in turn, was acquired by

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 ...

in 2008, which itself was acquired by Broadcom in 2012.

Name

SandCraft was named as such because sand represented

silicon Silicon is a chemical element with the symbol Si and atomic number 14. It is a hard, brittle crystalline solid with a blue-grey metallic luster, and is a tetravalent metalloid and semiconductor. It is a member of group 14 in the periodic tab ...

, the critical substrate in microprocessors, and craft to denote a design house.

History

Norman Yeung founded SandCraft, along with Mayank Gupta as chief architect in 1996. Microprocessors with Floating point units were designed verified and contracted out to Asian manufacturing based on MIPS IV, with 64 bit instruction sets, and a later processor called SR71000, which was at the time the world's highest performance MIPS processor. They incorporated

superscalar A superscalar processor is a CPU that implements a form of parallelism called instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. In contrast to a scalar processor, which can execute at most one single instruction per clock cycle, a sup ...

, multi-staged pipeline design, and big/ little endian support modes.

References

* https://old.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc10/2_Mon/HC10.S2/HC10.2.2.pdf {{tech-company-stub 1996 establishments in California 2003 disestablishments in California American companies established in 1996 American companies disestablished in 2003 Computer companies established in 1996 Computer companies disestablished in 2003 Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct technology companies based in California MIPS architecture