New RISC design house gets NEC as first client

Electronic News, August 11, 1997 by Jim DeTar

santa clara, calif.--A new RISC microprocessor design house, SandCraft, based here, has arrived on the scene, chartered to develop next-generation MIPS RISC architectures. SandCraft has jumped off to a fast start and is currently developing an embedded 64-bit MIPS-IV ISA-based RISC microprocessor for NEC.

The birth of SandCraft, and the seeming success of its predecessor in the embedded RISC design market, Quantum Effect Design (QED), corroborate the notion that the embedded RISC segment continues to be one of the fastest-growing semiconductor markets. QED's MIPS partners, including NKK, Toshiba and Integrated Device Technology (IDT), have collectively shipped more than 1 million units based on QED designs to-date, according to Rick Kepple, QED's VP of marketing.

SandCraft was formed in June 1996 by three former Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) engineering managers and engineers. All were key contributors to MIPS' R4300i, which became the industry's largest-volume-shipping 64-bit RISC microprocessor to date within its first year of production.

The SandCraft management team prides itself on being truly an international one, and includes Norman K. Yeung, president/CEO, originally from Hong Kong; Edward Tonguk Pak, chief engineer, from Korea; Mayank (Mike) Gupta, VP of engineering, from India; and Dirk Smith, executive VP of marketing, from the Netherlands. Mr. Smith is the only non-SGI alumnus, having himself come over from IDT, and from Intel prior to that.

In an in-depth interview, Messrs. Yeung and Smith outlined the start-up's RISC market entry strategy and discussed the ups and downs of a segment that is subject to extreme buffeting by consumer preferences. Mr. Yeung started out by bragging about his international design team.

"We now have the best microprocessor design team in the industry in place, and we want to push and drive the performance into the high-volume consumer applications. We all have a background in MIPS, and we are taking advantage of that," he said.

The management team's experience designing the MIPS R4300i is being drawn upon as new applications emerge. "Our architecture is like the 4300, but significantly different from the 4300 in that we took one feature from the 4300 and the rest are not," Mr. Yeung said.

"The main thing we learned from the 4300 is how to design a high performance processor and keep the price low. For instance, to get performance up, you don't just get your clock rate up. Die size is important because of the cost. Packaging is important, and getting a design robust means you have to have high yield; that gets your cost down, too."

Mr. Yeung added that instruction sets are also a critical factor in designing high-performance processors. "Adding one feature can eliminate two or three instructions," he noted.

SandCraft is a member of the Virtual Socket Interface (VSI) alliance and plans to initially come to market with a general-purpose microprocessor that will include features to support video, audio and communications applications. "We are now seeing system-on-a-chip as a big opportunity for start-ups like ourselves," Mr. Yeung said.

Mr. Smith said the consumer market continues to drive the embedded processor world, but the landscape is shifting. "What we believe is happening is that the consumer world is taking off. The TV-dominated world and the Internet-dominated world are converging. Everybody's been trying to come up with the next-generation thing. The 'battle for eyeballs' is about doing that. The common thing is that it is all going to be digital electronics. We are aiming the company to provide that horsepower."

SandCraft has a staff of about 25 people currently, a number that Mr. Yeung said could double by the end of the year or early 1998. The company does not currently have a MIPS license itself, but is looking to acquire one. "Yes, that's our intention; we have been working closely with MIPS," an SGI subsidiary, Mr. Yeung said.

The company is currently self-funded and 100 percent employee-owned, although sources close to the company said that NEC is a major backer of SandCraft as well as an OEM customer, and a deeper partnership could be in the works. When asked about that possibility, Mr. Yeung replied, "There is a lot of value in this company. It would be very attractive to do a partnership. We have been profitable from day one, which brings value to this company. We will continue to attract the best people, and get and hold patents."

Currently, SandCraft has filed for one patent, has four more patent applications ready to go, and could have a total of 10 applications filed by the end of the year, Mr. Yeung said.

Rick Kepple, VP of marketing for competitor QED, which pioneered the independent RISC design market, said he thinks SandCraft's entry can only serve to broaden the market.

"There are many various price/performance points enabled by these types of processors. We find there are more areas of markets than any one vendor can address. Because MIPS is the RISC architecture of choice, companies like QED and SandCraft are good for the market. Their business, and the fact that they are doing MIPS, is a good thing."