AMULET is a series of microprocessors implementing the ARM processor architecture. Developed by the Advanced Processor Technologies group at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester (formerly the AMULET and PAL groups based at the same institution), AMULET is unique amongst ARM implementations in being an asynchronous microprocessor, not making use of a square wave clock signal for data synchronization and movement.
A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the most important processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, logic, controlling, and input/output (I/O) operations. This role contrasts with that of external components, such as main memory and I/O circuitry, and specialized coprocessors such as graphics processing units (GPUs).
The StrongARM is a family of computer microprocessors developed by Digital Equipment Corporation and manufactured in the late 1990s which implemented the ARM v4 instruction set architecture. It was later acquired by Intel in 1997 from DEC's own Digital Semiconductor division as part of a settlement of a lawsuit between the two companies over patent infringement. Intel then continued to manufacture it before replacing it with the StrongARM-derived ARM-based follow-up architecture called XScale in the early 2000s.
Stephen Byram Furber is a British computer scientist, mathematician and hardware engineer, and Emeritus ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. After completing his education at the University of Cambridge, he spent the 1980s at Acorn Computers, where he was a principal designer of the BBC Micro and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor. As of 2023, over 250 billion ARM chips have been manufactured, powering much of the world's mobile computing and embedded systems, everything from sensors to smartphones to servers.
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester is the longest established department of Computer Science in the United Kingdom and one of the largest. It is located in the Kilburn Building on the Oxford Road and currently has over 800 students taking a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses and 60 full-time academic staff.
Asynchronous circuit is a sequential digital logic circuit that does not use a global clock circuit or signal generator to synchronize its components. Instead, the components are driven by a handshaking circuit which indicates a completion of a set of instructions. Handshaking works by simple data transfer protocols. Many synchronous circuits were developed in early 1950s as part of bigger asynchronous systems. Asynchronous circuits and theory surrounding is a part of several steps in integrated circuit design, a field of digital electronics engineering.
A quasi-delay-insensitive circuit is an asynchronous circuit design methodology employed in digital logic design. Developed in response to the performance challenges of building sub-micron, multi-core architectures with conventional synchronous designs, QDI circuits exhibit lower power consumption, extremely fine-grain pipelining, high circuit robustness against process–voltage–temperature variations, on-demand (event-driven) operation, and data-dependent completion time.
A network on a chip or network-on-chip is a network-based communications subsystem on an integrated circuit ("microchip"), most typically between modules in a system on a chip (SoC). The modules on the IC are typically semiconductor IP cores schematizing various functions of the computer system, and are designed to be modular in the sense of network science. The network on chip is a router-based packet switching network between SoC modules.
The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device. It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a die, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is. A better indication of this is transistor density which is the ratio of a semiconductor's transistor count to its die area.
The asynchronous array of simple processors (AsAP) architecture comprises a 2-D array of reduced complexity programmable processors with small scratchpad memories interconnected by a reconfigurable mesh network. AsAP was developed by researchers in the VLSI Computation Laboratory (VCL) at the University of California, Davis and achieves high performance and energy efficiency, while using a relatively small circuit area. It was made in 2006.
The NEC V60 is a CISC microprocessor manufactured by NEC starting in 1986. Several improved versions were introduced with the same instruction set architecture (ISA), the V70 in 1987, and the V80 and AFPP in 1989. They were succeeded by the V800 product families, which is currently produced by Renesas Electronics.
The Manchester computers were an innovative series of stored-program electronic computers developed during the 30-year period between 1947 and 1977 by a small team at the University of Manchester, under the leadership of Tom Kilburn. They included the world's first stored-program computer, the world's first transistorised computer, and what was the world's fastest computer at the time of its inauguration in 1962.
The SPARC64 V (Zeus) is a SPARC V9 microprocessor designed by Fujitsu. The SPARC64 V was the basis for a series of successive processors designed for servers, and later, supercomputers.
The x704 is a 32-bit PowerPC microprocessor developed in 1997 by Exponential Technology. The microprocessor was notable for its high clock frequency in the range of 400 to 533 MHz, its use of bipolar transistors for logic and CMOS circuits for memory, and its failure to see use in an Apple Macintosh, the opposite of what industry observers such as Microprocessor Report had expected. Exponential Technology eventually failed as a result of the x704's lack of success, but some of its former employees founded Intrinsity, a start-up that developed a high clock frequency MIPS implementation, FastMATH. Incidentally, Intrinsity was acquired by Apple in 2010 to aid in the development of their line of ARM microprocessors.
The PA-7100 is a microprocessor developed by Hewlett-Packard (HP) that implemented the PA-RISC 1.1 instruction set architecture (ISA). It is also known as the PCX-T and by its code name Thunderbird. It was introduced in early 1992 and was the first PA-RISC microprocessor to integrate the floating-point unit (FPU) on-die. It operated at 33 – 100 MHz and competed primarily with the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Alpha 21064 in the workstation and server markets. PA-7100 users were HP in its HP 9000 workstations and Stratus Computer in its Continuum fault-tolerant servers.
SpiNNaker is a massively parallel, manycore supercomputer architecture designed by the Advanced Processor Technologies Research Group (APT) at the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester. It is composed of 57,600 processing nodes, each with 18 ARM9 processors and 128 MB of mobile DDR SDRAM, totalling 1,036,800 cores and over 7 TB of RAM. The computing platform is based on spiking neural networks, useful in simulating the human brain.
Simon Anthony Segars is a British business executive executive who was chief executive officer (CEO) of ARM Holdings plc from 2013 to 2022. ARM is the UK's largest semiconductor IP company headquartered in Cambridge, England, and was acquired by SoftBank Group for £24.3 billion in 2016.
The Josephson junction count is the number of Josephson junctions on a superconducting integrated circuit chip. Josephson junctions are active circuit elements in superconducting circuits. The Josephson junction count is a measure of circuit or device complexity, similar to the transistor count used for semiconductor integrated circuits.
David Jaggar is a computer scientist who was responsible for the development of the ARM architecture between 1992 and 2000, redefining it from a low-cost workstation processor to the dominant embedded system processor.
Signal Transition Graphs (STGs) are typically used in electronic engineering and computer engineering to describe dynamic behaviour of asynchronous circuits, for the purposes of their analysis or synthesis.