Triad offers 1 million gates plus analog

LONDON – Triad Semiconductor Inc., whose via-configurable arrays offer programmable analog with a microcontroller, has announced the availability of its largest configurable array to date, the VCA-6, with more than one million ASIC gates.

The VCA-6 is fabricated on IBM's 0.18-micron 7RF process and manufactured within the United States making the device suitable for defense applications, according to Triad (Winston-Salem, N.C.). The VCA-6 is suitable for applications such as software defined radio, sonar, smart sensor fusion, FPGA plus analog replacement, unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV) controllers, Triad said.

The VCA-6 contains 320 configurable logic tiles. Each tile contains 3,150 NAND2 equivalent ASIC gates providing the array with a total of 1,008,000 ASIC gates. Unlike FPGAs, VCA-6 logic gates are not “equivalent system gates” but actual standard-cell gate primitives providing the size, performance, and power profile typical of a standard-cell digital ASIC implementation. Each logic tile also contains a 4,608-bit 2-port static RAM organized as 128 words by 36-bits. The array also contains a total of 160-kbytes of via configurable non-volatile read-only memory (ROM) arranged as 160 1K x 8 ROMs. The distributed RAM and ROM resources can be configured into larger composite memories using Triad’s ViaWare™ memory generator.

In addition the VCA-6 has over 100 op-amps with each op-amp surrounded by configurable collections of resistors, capacitors, transistors, and switches. The analog resources are arranged into single-ended analog tiles, fully differential analog tiles, resistive DAC tiles, bias tiles, and current steering DAC tiles. A single via-only mask layer change configures and interconnects these analog and digital resources into a wide range of mixed-signal circuits.

"The VCA-6 enables designers to replace power-hungry FPGAs and an entire board full of discrete analog parts with a lower power, single chip solution," said Reid Wender, vice president of marketing at Triad Semiconductor, in a statement.