Product category:
Microprocessors, Microcontrollers and DSPs
News Release from: Aspex Semiconductor | Subject: VASP 1024
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 16 January 2001
Aspex Technology achieves
right-first-time silicon
Aspex Technology has announced the delivery of right-first-time first silicon for its VLSI Associative String Processor (VASP) chip which features 1024 processing elements.
Aspex Technology, the venture funded, fabless semiconductor company, has announced the delivery of right-first-time first silicon for its VLSI Associative String Processor (VASP) chip which features 1024 processing elements and contains no fewer than 3 million transistors The Aspex VASP 1024 went from concept to silicon in less than a year and - incredibly for a design of such size - was running applications (written in industry standard C with extensions) within a fortnight of silicon tape-out
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 7 Oct 2003 at 8.00am (UK)
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Produced on Atmel's 0.5um process, the VASP 1024 processor represents a crucial milestone in Aspex' roadmap, drawing on innovative parallel processing technology and single instruction multiple data (SIMD) architecture.
Delivering an extremely powerful, flexible and yet linearly scaleable solution to the digital signal processing world, the VASP 1024 is testimony to Aspex' Associative String Processing (ASP) technology and, underpinning ASP, the company's Modular Massively Parallel Computing (Modular MPC) architecture.
"The VASP 1024 associative string processor is a remarkable achievement", comments Graham Dodgson, Aspex' Director and EVP Sales and Marketing.
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"The part was developed in less than a year, during a time of significant change for Aspex, and it's a credit to our engineering team that this 3 million transistor design was running code so soon after tape-out".
Aspex attributes the success of the development of VASP 1024 to: the fusion of different design methodologies; the use of tightly integrated EDA tools; well made management decisions (the setting of clear goals/objectives); and the dedicated efforts of one of the best engineering teams in Europe.
"The VASP 1024 has a clear role to play in Aspex' future", continues Dodgson "It is an extremely powerful standalone associative string processor and is also the engine in our System-P development card - which allows engineers to develop applications that will run on our forthcoming Linedancer chip".
At the heart of the VASP 1024 is Aspex' ASProCore - an 'intelligent' distributed memory which is massively repeated throughout Aspex' Modular-MPC architecture.
The ASProCore was developed at the cell level, in much the same way memory cells are, allowing the Aspex engineers (working at the transistor level) to push the silicon process technology and give the ASProCore its un-paralleled power density and efficiency.
"Associative String Processing is here and very, very real", concludes Dodgson.
"Applications that run on the System-P will run on our forthcoming Linedancer (VASP 4096) chip and future IP offerings - so designers can work with System-P now, knowing that applications will port in the future".
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