Kalray is a
fabless
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 ...
semiconductor
A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical resistivity and conductivity, electrical conductivity value falling between that of a electrical conductor, conductor, such as copper, and an insulator (electricity), insulator, such as glas ...
company.
Founded in 2008 as a spin-off of
CEA French lab, with investors such as
Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi Alliance
The Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi Alliance, originally known as the Renault–Nissan Alliance, is a French-Japanese strategic alliance between the automobile manufacturers Renault (based in Boulogne-Billancourt, France), Nissan (based in Yokoham ...
,
Safran
Safran S.A. is a French multinational company that designs, develops and manufactures aircraft engines, rocket engines as well as various aerospace and defense-related equipment or their components. It was formed by a merger between SNECMA and ...
,
NXP Semiconductors
NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NXP) is a Dutch semiconductor designer and manufacturer with headquarters in Eindhoven, Netherlands. The company employs approximately 31,000 people in more than 30 countries. NXP reported revenue of $11.06 billion in 2 ...
,
CEA and
Bpifrance.
Product history
The first Kalray patent was filed in 2010. Today the company holds more than 30 patent families, including 2 families with an exclusive CEA license.
On 22 June 2015, Kalray began the distribution of data center acceleration board families: TurboCard and KONIC, for networking and storage applications, both of which can be programmed with either standard
C or
C++. TurboCard and KONIC both utilize the MPPA2-256 Bostan second generation processor.
Kalray chips
Kalray chips are code-named after Mountains. However each chip is called a "MPPA" for "Massively Parallel Processor Array":
MPPA-256 Andey
Produced in 2013 in CMOS 28HP technology from TSMC, this SoC (or
System-on-Chip) runs at 400 MHz and contains 256
VLIW processing cores.
MPPA2-256 Bostan
Produced in 2015 with the same CMOS 28HP technology from TSMC, this SoC running at 550 MHz was enhanced to increase the floating-point performance of the VLIW cores, to natively support the
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
operating system, and to process high-speed Ethernet (up to 80 Gbit/s). Each VLIW core was extended with a tightly coupled cryptographic coprocessor for security protocol acceleration.
MPPA2.2-256 Bostan2
Produced in 2017, this processor is based on the previous generation, Bostan, with an improved DDR controller, Ethernet controller and PCIe controller. As a result, this processor fully supports the NVM Express (
NVMe) standard interface (for connecting hosts to PCIe bus-attached SSDs), and also the NVMe over Fabrics standard using
RDMA (for connections between servers, storage controllers, and NVMe enclosures).
MPPA3-80 Coolidge
The third-generation MPPA processor Coolidge has been released. Based on TSMC 16 nm FinFET process technology, this processor includes 80 64-bit VLIW processing cores distributed among 5 clusters, 8x 25 Gbit/s Ethernet and 16x PCIe Gen4 interfaces. Each VLIW core is extended with a tightly coupled tensor co-processor for deep learning application acceleration.
Listing on Euronext
In 2017, ahead of the launch of Kalray's third-generation microprocessor, Safran and Pengpai joined the company's historical investors (mainly CEA Investissement, ACE, INOCAP). In 2018, Alliance Ventures (strategic venture capital fund operated by
Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi) and Definvest (an investment fund managed by
Bpifrance on behalf of the French Ministry of Armed Forces) also acquired stakes in Kalray.
On June 12, 2018, Kalray launched its IPO on the
Euronext Paris
Euronext Paris is France's securities market, formerly known as the Paris Bourse, which merged with the Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Brussels exchanges in September 2000 to form Euronext NV. As of 2022, the 795 companies listed had a combined marke ...
Stock Market and raised €47.7M (after exercise of the over-allocation option), "the most significant IPO since Euronext Growth was created in Paris."
[{{Cite news, url=http://www.kalrayinc.com/kalray-has-raised-43-5-m/, title=Kalray has raised €43.5M: the most significant IPO since Euronext Growth was created in Paris - Kalray, date=2018-06-07, work=Kalray, access-date=2018-06-28, language=en-US]
References
French companies established in 2008
Semiconductor companies of France