PA Semi Sampling to Partners
| 02-05-2007A little over a year ago, the folks at PA Semi presented their plans at the Fall Processor Forum to build a 25W embedded high performance platform for networking and storage applications. Simultaneously, they demonstrated a multi board FPGA emulator booting Linux at around 2MHz. According to PA Semi’s predictions, a working device would typically consume 13W through a variety of power optimization tricks.
Fast forward a bit and PA Semi has just announced that their embedded system on a chip, the PA6T-1682M is sampling to early customers. They claim 10 alpha customers, and 100 engagements which will lead to future revenue. The main thrust of the announcement is that the whiteboard phase of PA Semi’s existence is over, and now they have all the pieces in place for a successful ecosystem. They have partnered with embedded OS vendors such as VxWork and QNX, and also 3rd party hardware debuggers and emulators.
One of the revelations this time around was unexpected interest from the military and aerospace. This is largely due to legacy investments in the Altivec instruction set, which is ideal for tasks such as visualization; for a radar display, you don’t exactly need the most cutting edge dedicated graphics processor and reasonably long vectors will do in a pinch.
Another future market for PA Semi is game consoles, which is understandable given that every current console maker is using the PowerPC architecture. Realistically, the only likely candidate would be Nintendo’s next generation console. Both Microsoft and Sony have experience with emulation for backwards compatibility, which makes the PowerPC aspect less essential. Moreover, both of their current systems are very high performance (and power) relative to PA Semi’s products, and must bring even more performance in future generations. In contrast, Nintendo has deliberately chosen a different course that emphasizes usability, low cost and low power, and would be probably be relieved to avoid the backwards compatibility issue. However, the game console market is a very unusual one; typically console manufacturers demand ownership or at least an expansive license, of the underlying IP. Whether PA can break into this market remains to be seen, but obviously the next generation of consoles is quite a bit off.
Lastly, the folks at PA also briefly discussed a dynamic voltage modulation technique that reduces power substantially…however, as this will undoubtedly be further discussed at ISSCC, it would be premature to go into such details now.
