High-Tech Firms Form Alliance To Develop `Systems on a Chip'
May 16, 2011
In a sign of the growing complexity and cost of semiconductor design, 36 companies have formed an alliance aimed at speeding development of so-called systems on a chip. The goal of ``systems on a chip'' -- one of the hottest areas of technology research -- is to create advanced semiconductors that can do jobs now done by a dozen chips in an entire computer. Such chips could greatly simplify computing and lead to new generations of advanced video games, cellular phones and other devices. The alliance is expected to be announced Tuesday, according to some of the companies involved. It includes makers of software tools for chip design, such as Cadence Design Systems Inc., Mentor Graphics Corp. and Synopsys Inc.; chip manufacturers such as Cirrus Logic Inc. and VLSI Technology Inc.; and systems heavyweights such as Sun Microsystems Inc., Silicon Graphics Inc., Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp.. Those companies and several others have agreed to invest millions of dollars in the project. ``We're building an infrastructure so that we can quickly mix and match designs and enable the system-on-a-chip industry to grow much faster,'' said Stormy Demers, director of market development at chip-design tool company Cadence Design in San Jose, Calif.. The alliance, unusual for the technology industry in its scope and size, will enable the companies to share designs and research that are usually zealously guarded secrets. The idea is to create compatible designs so that each company's chip components can be mixed and matched with others. The need for such an arrangement reflects the numbing complexity of modern chip design, which increasingly is becoming too much for an individual company to handle on its own. Where it once took dozens of chips to create an electronic system like a computer, it will soon be possible to use just one chip. But that will require chip makers to put at least five million basic components, or gates, on a single silicon chip -- about the size of a thumbnail -- but enough real estate for designers to put an entire computing system. Currently, one chip can hold a million or fewer gates, and numerous chips often must be linked together on a circuit board to make a complete system. ``The system-on-a-chip era will change the way all electronic systems are designed,'' said Gaye Jon, analyst at Dataquest Inc. in San Jose. ``It will make possible all kinds of electronic gadgets we never dreamed of before.'' But designers may not be up to the task of accurately designing and testing those extra millions of chip gates unless they can easily reuse components from past designs, plugging them into a chip as if they were plugging components into a socket on a circuit board. The alliance's technical standards will enable this to happen.
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