Alchip works with TSMC on processor for University of Tokyo supercomputer

Dec 13, 2006 05:12:03

In collaboration with the University of Tokyo and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Alchip Technologies has announced its first silicon success of the Sing processor for Grape-DR, the next generation of the world's fastest supercomputers targeting 2,000 trillion transactions per second (2PFLOPS). This chip features 512 CPUs on a single chip with over 60 million logic gates and 10 million bits of SRAM utilizing a TSMC 90nm process and flip-chip package technology, Alchip said. According to Alchip, the Grape series are the world's fastest supercomputers. Grape-DR is designed to compute over 31 times faster than its predecessor Grape-6 (64 trillion computations per second) and to cover general computing. The Sing processor contains over 60 million logic gates aiming at 500MHz performance for the whole chip while consuming about 50 watts of power. Alchip was responsible for the complete design integration which includes physical, electrical, timing and thermal design of the system-on-chip ( SoC ) project . The chip adopted TSMC's 90nm eight-layer metal process with a silicon redistribution layer (RDL) in a flip-chip BGA package. Alchip's divide-and-conquer methodology was used to partition the design into three levels of hierarchy for parallel implementation. Alchip's unique on-chip clocking distribution structure achieved minimum global clock skew on the scale of 18mm by 18mm die size. It enabled high speed operation by avoiding serious nanometer on-chip variation (OCV) which can affect circuits performance.