IBM ASIC technology helps power new Cray supercomputerEast Fishkill 02 January 2002 IBM is the sole application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology provider for the new Cray X1 supercomputer, which is now being shipped to customers. The Cray supercomputer contains 800 IBM ASIC chips, designed by Cray exclusively for the X1 and manufactured by IBM. The chips feature gate counts as high as 14.2 million, an average gate count of about 9.5 million, and a total gate count of about 7.5 billion (a gate is a basic logic circuit).
The ASICs chips provide processing power for the new Cray system and are used for scalar computation and vector processing. The chips, arrayed on multi-chip modules, utilise IBM's advanced copper technology.
IBM has the industry's most advanced ASIC offering. Called Cu-08, it supports circuits as small as 90 nanometers (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter), as well as innovative materials and design techniques to drive power consumption down by as much as 40 percent while pushing performance up as much as 20 percent.
Cu-08 supports up to eight layers of copper wiring, separated by an advanced "low-k dielectric" insulation, linking hundreds of millions of transistors to form up to 72 million wireable gates ? all on a single chip. Cu-08 can be used to create complete system-on-a-chip designs, where elements such as processors, memory and analogue functions all are combined on one piece of silicon.
Leslie Versweyveld |
 |