14 DAY TRIAL // eSilicon Corporation together with MIPS Technologies have just announced that the two companies have taped out a high-performance, three-way microprocessor cluster built using Globalfoundries low-power 28nm-SLP process technology.
According to the press release sent out by the two partners, wafers are currently running in Globalfoundries Fab 1 in Dresden, Germany, with silicon expected in early 2012.
The microprocessor cluster is based on a MIPS32 1074Kf Coherent Processing System (CPS) which was optimized by eSilicon to achieve a target frequency of approximately 1.5GHz, with worst-case performance being set 1GHz.
At the heart of the MIPS 1074Kf stands a superscalar, MIPS32 74K processor core, which uses a 15 stage out-of-order architecture and that is already in production with numerous customers for digital televisions, set-top boxes and a variety of home networking applications.
Customers can license a 1GHz implementation of the cluster chip right now from eSilicon, which can also be customized and optimized as apart of a SoC device.
“This was an exciting project for our custom IP engineers. Our custom FCIs did the trick in enabling us to meet the fast-approaching shuttle date,” said Paul Hollingworth, eSilicon VP of strategic marketing.
“Together with the high quality of the MIPS 1074K design, we were able to quickly meet the challenging performance targets in a low-power process.
“eSilicon is looking forward to embedding this cluster into SoC designs for our customers to help them achieve a truly compelling combination of high performance, low price and low power,” concluded the company's rep.
No further details regarding Globalfoudries' 28nm fabrication node are available at this time, but let's keep our fingers crossed this will turn up better than the 32nm high-k metal gate process used for AMD's Llano accelerated processing units. (via Semi Accurate)