A microprocessor is a computer processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circuitry required to perform the functions of a computer's central processing unit (CPU). The IC is capable of interpreting and executing program instructions and performing arithmetic operations. The microprocessor is a multipurpose, clock-driven, register-based, digital integrated circuit that accepts binary data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and provides results as output. Microprocessors contain both combinational logic and sequential digital logic, and operate on numbers and symbols represented in the binary number system.
MIPS Tech LLC, formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. and MIPS Technologies, Inc., is an American fabless semiconductor design company that is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of RISC CPU chips based on it. MIPS provides processor architectures and cores for digital home, networking, embedded, Internet of things and mobile applications.
The transputer is a series of pioneering microprocessors from the 1980s, intended for parallel computing. To support this, each transputer had its own integrated memory and serial communication links to exchange data with other transputers. They were designed and produced by Inmos, a semiconductor company based in Bristol, United Kingdom.
Atmel Corporation was a creator and manufacturer of semiconductors before being subsumed by Microchip Technology in 2016. Atmel was founded in 1984. The company focused on embedded systems built around microcontrollers. Its products included microcontrollers radio-frequency (RF) devices including Wi-Fi, EEPROM, and flash memory devices, symmetric and asymmetric security chips, touch sensors and controllers, and application-specific products. Atmel supplies its devices as standard products, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), or application-specific standard product (ASSPs) depending on the requirements of its customers.
Renesas Electronics Corporation is a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, initially incorporated in 2002 as Renesas Technology, the consolidated entity of the semiconductor units of Hitachi and Mitsubishi excluding their dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) businesses, to which NEC Electronics merged in 2010, resulting in a minor change in the corporate name and logo to as it is now.
Infineon Technologies AG is Germany's largest semiconductor manufacturer. The company was spun-off from Siemens AG in 1999. Infineon has about 58,600 employees in 2023 and is one of the ten largest semiconductor manufacturers worldwide. In 2023 the company achieved sales of €16.309 billion.
Xilinx, Inc. was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company is known for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA). It also created the first fabless manufacturing model.
Nordic Semiconductor ASA was founded in 1983 and is a Norwegian fabless technology company with its headquarters in Trondheim, Norway. The company specializes in designing ultra-low-power wireless communication semiconductors and supporting software for engineers developing and manufacturing Internet of Things (IoT) products.
V850 is a 32-bit RISC CPU architecture produced by Renesas Electronics for embedded microcontrollers. It was designed by NEC as a replacement for their earlier NEC V60 family, and was introduced shortly before NEC sold their designs to Renesas in the early 1990s. It has continued to be developed by Renesas as of 2018.
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.
Microchip Technology Incorporated is a publicly listed American corporation that manufactures microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog, and Flash-IP integrated circuits. Its products include microcontrollers, Serial EEPROM devices, Serial SRAM devices, embedded security devices, radio frequency (RF) devices, thermal, power, and battery management analog devices, as well as linear, interface and wireless products.
ARM11 is a group of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Holdings. The ARM11 core family consists of ARM1136J(F)-S, ARM1156T2(F)-S, ARM1176JZ(F)-S, and ARM11MPCore. Since ARM11 cores were released from 2002 to 2005, they are no longer recommended for new IC designs, instead ARM Cortex-A and ARM Cortex-R cores are preferred.
Tensilica Inc. was a company based in Silicon Valley in the semiconductor intellectual property core business. It is now a part of Cadence Design Systems.
Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing unit (CPU) cores that implement the ARM architecture family of instruction sets. It also designs other chips, provides software development tools under the DS-5, RealView and Keil brands, and provides systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip (SoC) infrastructure and software. As a "holding" company, it also holds shares of other companies. Since 2016, it has been majority owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.
GigaDevice Semiconductor is a Chinese NOR flash memory designer. It also produces microcontrollers, some of them are based on the ARM architecture, and other on the RISC-V architecture. GD32 chips were introduced in 2015 and are compatible in pinout and periphery options to the STM32 line of microcontrollers.
SiFive, Inc. is an American fabless semiconductor company and provider of commercial RISC-V processors and silicon chips based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). Its products include cores, SoCs, IPs, and development boards.
Graphcore Limited is a British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning. It has introduced a massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) that holds the complete machine learning model inside the processor.
