Intrinsity

Intrinsity, Inc. was a privately held Austin, Texas based fabless semiconductor company; it was founded in 1997 as EVSX on the remnants of Exponential Technology and changed its name to Intrinsity in 2000. It had around 100 employees and supplied tools and services for highly efficient semiconductor logic design, enabling high performance microprocessors with fewer transistors and low power consumption. The acquisition of the firm by Apple Inc. was confirmed on April 27, 2010.

Products

Intrinsity's main selling point was its Fast14 technology, a set of design tools implemented in custom EDA software, for using dynamic logic and novel signal encodings to permit greater processor speeds in a given process than naive static design can offer.

Concepts used in Fast14 are described in a white paper: and include the use of multi-phase clocks so that synchronisation is not required at every cycle boundary (that is, a pipelined design does not require latches at every clock cycle); '' 1-of-N'' encoding where a signal with N states is carried as a voltage on one of N wires with the other N-1 grounded, rather than being carried on log(N) wires which can be in arbitrary states; and a variety of sophisticated routing algorithms including ones which permute the order of the wires in a bundle carrying a 1-of-N signal in such a way as to reduce noise exposure, and ones which allow complicated gates to 'borrow' delay from simple ones to allow a shorter clock cycle than a more pessimistic design approach permits. Converters between the two signal encodings are readily available, and are useful for interfacing to blocks of static logic.

This technology has been used to implement ARM, MIPS and Power ISA cores, which Intrinsity licences under the name of ''FastCores''; the first implementation was ''FastMATH'', a MIPS-based DSP-like microprocessor implemented in 130 nm technology and introduced in 2002. It operates at 15 W power at 2.0 GHz and 1 V, and 6 W power at 1 GHz and 0.85 V; it was awarded Best Extreme Processor in 2003 by '' Microprocessor Report''. The design took 16 months by a team of 45 engineers.

In July 2009, Intrinsity announced that it had developed in collaboration with Samsung a 1 GHz implementation of the ARM Cortex-A8 chip; it had developed a similar high-speed implementation of the Cortex-R4 chip two years earlier.

Customers

* ATI – for reducing transistor count in GPUs.
* AMCC – for Power ISA based designs reaching 3 GHz.
* LSI Corporation (then Agere Systems) – for high performance and low power macrocell design.
* Samsung - for high-speed, low power processor cores.

See also

* Early iPhone systems-on-chip

References

External links

*

Intrinsity Turns a Corner – Microprocessor Report

EVSX Announces Name Change and Technology Focus. – Business Wire



Working link to Fast14_Overview.pdf which disappeared from the Internet Archive

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1997 establishments in Texas
2010 disestablishments in Texas
2010 mergers and acquisitions
American companies established in 1997
American companies disestablished in 2010
Apple Inc. acquisitions
Computer companies established in 1997
Computer companies disestablished in 2010
Defunct computer companies of the United States
Defunct computer hardware companies
Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States
Electronics companies established in 1997
Electronics companies disestablished in 2010
Fabless semiconductor companies