High-Speed Gallium Arsenide Chip Compatible with Silicon
 
Microbytes Daily News Service
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Despite continuing advances in technology, many people believe
that the omnipresent silicon chip is about to reach a dead end in
terms of high clock speed. Some researchers are trying to bypass
this roadblock by using new types of chips, including BiCMOS and
emitter-coupled logic.
 
Other researchers are developing chips based on gallium arsenide
(GaAs) rather than silicon. Although they are expensive and con-
sidered hard to work with, GaAs chips are extremely fast, as
proven by a new chip from Vitesse. The company has just announced
a new GaAs gate-array chip that, despite its high speed, looks
and acts like a regular silicon chip.
 
The new chip contains 30,000 gates. To put that into perspective,
the first implementation of Sun's SPARC processor required only
about 20,000 gates. Vitesse officials claim that the chip could
run at a blazingly fast speed of about 150 MHz. However, the chip
is too expensive ($1500-$1600 depending on quantity) and uses too
much power (12 watts) for use in personal computers. But the GaAs
chip might be well-suited for workstations.
 
Vitesse officials say that there will be increasing use of GaAs
chips, even in personal computers. The reason? As clock speeds
for microprocessors climb from 25 MHz to 33 and even to 50, some
support chips for these processors must continue to run twice as
fast as the processor. This means that eventually chips designed
for such tasks as bus arbitration and cache control will have to
run at up to 100 MHz. Vitesse plans to offer a number of smaller,
less-expensive GaAs gate-array chips that can be used for these
functions in personal computers.
 
Contact: Vitesse Semiconductor Corp., 741 Calle Plano, Camarillo,
CA 93010; (805) 388-3700; fax (805) 987-5896.
 
                              --- Rich Malloy
 
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