First design of LSI 500K due in 60 days

Electronic News, Feb 21, 1994 by Jim DeTar

MILPTAS, CALIF.--LSI Logic is ahead of schedule as it rolls out its new 500K application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) family, according to Wilf Corrigan, LSI's co-founder chairman and CEO. LSI has positioned the 500K family as the foundation for a new generation of products that are expected to bring the company into the billion-dollar company circle by 1995--contingent on market acceptance of these new products and technologies in the months ahead.

"We shipped silicon to customers already. I would guess we'll ship the first customer designs in about 60 days. That's the first customer that's come in, done a design and we've given him some silicon." Mr. Corrigan said. When the 500K family was introduced last fall (EN, Nov. 15, 1993), LSI said process qualification and limited production were not expected until the second half of 1994, with volume production expected by the end of the year.

The company's 3.3V 500K family, available as the array-based LCA500K, the embedded array LEA500K and cell-based LCB500K implementation, supports interconnects as fast as 622MHz and system clock speeds in excess of 200MHz. Accordingly, the family offers up to five-pad pitch options and a choice of two-layer, three-layer and four-layer metal interconnect, depending on whether designs are core-limited or require embedded memory. Currently, more than 50 percent of LSI's product mix is ASICs.

Meanwhile, LSI's new Hydra multiprocessing chipset for Pentium-based systems, originally scheduled to ship 1Q94 (EN, Nov. 1, 1993), is slightly behind schedule but is drawing strong customer interest, Mr. Corrigan said.

"We're getting very good interest in Hydra and should have that product out in the next couple of months. I think it will be an important aspect of our business. We are a major supplier to Intel so we really didn't do much work on what you might call the unit processor version of the Pentium chipset. Because we were doing that chipset for Intel, we figured it would be too much of a conflict in the marketplace.

"We'll probably ship the first samples in a little more than a month, and probably be in volume by the middle of the year," Mr. Corrigan noted.

Created for designers that want to incorporate several Pentiums in a single system, Hydra supports the symmetrical multiprocessing features of Windiows NT, UNIX and other multi-user operating systems and 60/66 MHZ Pentiums. The Hyda chipset includes a CPU and bus controller and two memory interfaces--fabricated using LSI's 0.6 micron CMOS process.

Another product that LSI is counting on to propel its growth is Apple's Newton personal digital assistant (PDA), which uses an ARM (Advanced Risc Machines) processsor core. LSI makes ASICs for the Newton, which faces competition from a wide variety of new and planned PDAs based on RISC contenders such as AT&T's Hobbit, NEC's V810, Hitachi's SH7000 (see Hitachi SH7000 updated elsewhere in this issue), as well as CISC chips such as Intel's Polar and Motorola's 68349.

"Newton looks like a very good product. But all the different people in that marketplace are trying to make their product be the standard. So time is going to tell whether the Newton is going to be 'the' standard, or just one of several.

"The issue always is software. The Intel architecture has the most software out there. We think the MIPS architecture could be most cost-effective in the PDA. Apple is using ARM architecture, which is quite small. And it's very cost-effective."

Yet another area of growth for LSI is video and voice compression chips.

"Compression has become a major portion of our new business," LSI's Mr. Corrigan declared. "The number of applications where we have a MIPS core and an MPEG core on the same chip is amazing. That's what you need in a video game, that's what you need in a direct broadcast satellite decoder, it's what you need in a cable set-top box. It's the same architecture."

Although LSI is not currently constrained for wafer fabrication space, according to Mr. Corrigan, other semi-conductor vendors are feeling the pinch, especially those with leading-edge technology.

"The fab constraint is not coming. It's here. It's been here for about the past year. I think it's not quite so apparent because the shortage has been mainly in the new technologies. I think the thing that's going to accelerate it is that, for a lot of reasons, people have to move to 3V. You've got things like the "Green PC" so there's going to be legislation that's going to limit how much power a PC can put out.

"You've got to move from 5V to 3V and, at the same time, show some improvement in speed, which means you've got to drop almost two generations in technology pretty fast. I think we're coming to a point of rapid obsolence of older technology. Suddenly, you've got a real shortage of advanced technology capacity.

"You can't just count fabs. You've got to say 'What do they do?' And if they do I micron and above, there's a surplus. If it's 1 micron and less, there's a shortage. I think that's going to apply for a while. I think probably two years," Mr. Corrigan said.