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My recollection is that when P. A. Semi was acquired by Apple, a major part of their "secret sauce" was a custom cell library. And then Intrinsity, a few years
by addaon 6y ago
My recollection is that when P. A. Semi was acquired by Apple, a major part of their "secret sauce" was a custom cell library. And then Intrinsity, a few years later, also seemed to be using custom cells on Samsung's process. Is this recollection / understanding correct? Is Apple still using custom cell libraries rather than TSMC's standard library?
- ahupp 6y agoWhat does "cell" mean in this context?
- robert_foss 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cell
- dreamcompiler 6y agoIt's one level of abstraction above the transistor level; in other words gates and sets of gates. Designing at the raw transistor level is tedious, time-consuming, and requires specialized knowledge of low-level electrical and physics characteristics. When you design with standard cells, you only have to think about the logic functionality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cell The parent's question is about whether Apple really did do some of the designing at the transistor level by designing their own cells, rather than using a standard library. This could give them an edge that ordinary users of the standard library wouldn't have.
- morganw 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cell#Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cell#Library "A standard cell library is a collection of low-level electronic logic functions such as AND, OR, INVERT, flip-flops, latches, and buffers. " I think SRAMs are also built of standard cells & there can be a lot of flexibility to improve on the fab's library, particularly with multiple ports for caches.
- Geee 6y agoIt's the basic low-level building block of an integrated circuit.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cell
- greyhair 6y agoThe team at P.A.Semi was the team that developed the DEC Alpha and the DEC StrongARM. After DEC folded, they went on to develop PowerPC based chips. Shortly after they completed their PowerPC design they were bought up by Apple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
- klelatti 6y agoIronically StrongARM was sold to Intel who developed it as XScale before selling to Marvell.