Mixed Logic Gates

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, NC). 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 more than 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.

+Scientematics+: Logic Gates

A logic gate is an idealized or physical device implementing a Boolean function, that is, it performs a logical operation on one or more logic inputs and produces a single logic output. Depending on the context, the term may refer to an ideal logic gate, one that has for instance zero rise time and unlimited fan-out, or it may refer to a non-ideal physical device. Logic gates are primarily implemented using diodes or transistors acting as electronic switches, but can also be constructed using electromagnetic relays (relay logic), fluidic logic, pneumatic logic, optics, molecules, or even mechanical elements. With amplification, logic gates can be cascaded in the same way that Boolean functions can be composed, allowing the construction of a physical model of all of Boolean logic, and therefore, all of the algorithms and mathematics that can be described with Boolean logic. The simplest form of electronic logic is diode logic. This allows AND and OR gates to be built, but not inverters, and so is an incomplete form of logic. Further, without some kind of amplification it is not possible to have such basic logic operations cascaded as required for more complex logic functions. To build a functionally complete logic system, relays, valves (vacuum tubes), or transistors can be used. The simplest family of logic gates using bipolar transistors is called resistor-transistor logic (RTL). Unlike diode logic gates, RTL gates can be cascaded indefinitely to produce more complex logic functions. These gates were used in early integrated circuits. For higher speed, the resistors used in RTL were replaced by diodes, leading to diode-transistor logic (DTL). Transistor-transistor logic (TTL) then supplanted DTL with the observation that one transistor could do the job of two diodes even more quickly, using only half the space.

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