Startup picoChip Designs Ltd., from England, has announced a processor with 430 16-bit cores on a die. The company thinks its biggest market will be W-CDMA.
The picoArray involves a massively parallel array of four different kinds of processors, each of which picoChip reckons is equivalent to an ARM 9, linked by a switch.
"The first type has instructions for such functions as spread/despread and acceleration for forward error correction, such as Viterbi and Turbo," said Doug Pulley, co-founder and chief technology officer of picoChip. "Another type will have a dedicated multiply-accumulate unit, for filtering, etc. . . . These first two have similar amounts of code and data storage."
The third type is similar to the first type, said Pulley, but quadruples the amount of memory for code and data storage, to address such applications as block processing (vs. stream processing). The extra memory also allows a designer to compile more substantive C to the processor, allowing its use for many control applications in the baseband. "Layer 1 systems are incorporating increasing amounts of control, which is most effectively performed by distributing it throughout the architecture," Pulley said.
The fourth processing element is a form of device controller, so it quadruples the memory yet again. It is used for scheduling operations, Pulley said.
Here is a diagram of the picoArray with its 430 ARM-like processing elements, each with its own memory and math units.
The picoArray has been implemented on a 0.13-micron process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and is currently in the fab. The company expects first silicon in the next couple of weeks, at which time it can begin characterization.
Andrew Orlowski adds that besides 3G basestations, "other uses for picoArrays could be 802.11 access points or real time crypto or image processing."
Sources: Patrick Mannion and Ron Wilson, CommsDesign, an EE Times community, December 2, 2002; Andrew Orlowski, The Register, December 10, 2002
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