Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets.
Processor design is a subfield of computer engineering and electronics engineering (fabrication) that deals with creating a processor, a key component of computer hardware.
A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing – hence the term field-programmable. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware description language (HDL), similar to that used for an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Circuit diagrams were previously used to specify the configuration, but this is increasingly rare due to the advent of electronic design automation tools.
A system on a chip or system-on-chip is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memory interfaces, on-chip input/output devices, input/output interfaces, and secondary storage interfaces, often alongside other components such as radio modems and a graphics processing unit (GPU) – all on a single substrate or microchip. It may contain digital, analog, mixed-signal, and often radio frequency signal processing functions.
An application-specific integrated circuit is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency video codec. Application-specific standard product (ASSP) chips are intermediate between ASICs and industry standard integrated circuits like the 7400 series or the 4000 series. ASIC chips are typically fabricated using metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) technology, as MOS integrated circuit chips.
Altera Corporation was a manufacturer of programmable logic devices (PLDs) headquartered in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1983 and acquired by Intel in 2015.
A gate array is an approach to the design and manufacture of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) using a prefabricated chip with components that are later interconnected into logic devices according to a custom order by adding metal interconnect layers in the factory. It was popular during upheaval in semiconductor industry in 80s and its usage declined by end of 90s.
Xilinx, Inc. is an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company was known for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and creating the first fabless manufacturing model.
In electronic design, a semiconductor intellectual property core, IP core, or IP block is a reusable unit of logic, cell, or integrated circuit layout design that is the intellectual property of one party. IP cores can be licensed to another party or owned and used by a single party. The term comes from the licensing of the patent or source code copyright that exists in the design. Designers of application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) and systems of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) logic can use IP cores as building blocks.
Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware designed to perform specific functions more efficiently when compared to software running on a general-purpose central processing unit (CPU). Any transformation of data that can be calculated in software running on a generic CPU can also be calculated in custom-made hardware, or in some mix of both.
Actel Corporation was an American manufacturer of nonvolatile, low-power field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), mixed-signal FPGAs, and programmable logic solutions. It was headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices worldwide. In November 2010, Actel was acquired by Microsemi for $430 million.
The term die shrink refers to the scaling of metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) devices. The act of shrinking a die is to create a somewhat identical circuit using a more advanced fabrication process, usually involving an advance of lithographic nodes. This reduces overall costs for a chip company, as the absence of major architectural changes to the processor lowers research and development costs while at the same time allowing more processor dies to be manufactured on the same piece of silicon wafer, resulting in less cost per product sold.
Microsemi Corporation was an Aliso Viejo, California-based provider of semiconductor and system solutions for aerospace & defense, communications, data center and industrial markets.
eSilicon was a fabless semiconductor company founded in 1999 in San Jose, California. eSilicon designs and manufactures digital CMOS and finFET ASICs. In addition, eSilicon designs market-specific semiconductor IP platforms and provides custom IC manufacturing services. eSilicon is considered a pioneer of the fabless ASIC model. They focus on developing and managing the manufacturing process of complex finFET-class chips, 2.5D packaging solutions and advanced semiconductor IP for customers in the high-bandwidth networking, high-performance computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G infrastructure markets.
Field-programmable gate array prototyping, also referred to as FPGA-based prototyping, ASIC prototyping or system-on-chip (SoC) prototyping, is the method to prototype system-on-chip and application-specific integrated circuit designs on FPGAs for hardware verification and early software development.
LSI Logic Corporation, an American company founded in Santa Clara, California, was a pioneer in the ASIC and EDA industries. It evolved over time to design and sell semiconductors and software that accelerated storage and networking in data centers, mobile networks and client computing.
Tabula was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. Founded in 2003 by Steve Teig, it raised $215 million in venture funding. The company designed and built three dimensional field programmable gate arrays and ranked third on the Wall Street Journal's annual "Next Big Thing" list in 2012.
Achronix Semiconductor is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California with an additional R&D facility in Bangalore, India, and an additional sales office in Shenzhen, China. Achronix is a diversified fabless semiconductor company that sells FPGA products, embedded FPGA (eFPGA) products, system-level products and supporting design tools. Achronix was founded in 2004 in Ithaca, New York based on technology licensed from Cornell University. In 2006, Achronix moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley.
SiFive is a fabless semiconductor company and provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon chips based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). SiFive's products include cores, SoCs, IPs, and development boards.
Ampere Computing LLC is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California that develops cloud native server microprocessors (CNPs). Ampere also has offices in: Portland, Oregon; Taipei, Taiwan; Raleigh, North Carolina; Bangalore, India; and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
