TRW, Motorola Unveil New Fast, High-Powered Chip
TRW Inc. and Motorola Corp. on Wednesday unveiled a 4.4-square-inch, 1.5-ounce computer chip with the computational power of a supercomputer the size of an entire room.
Although the device, called the CPUAX SuperChip, is initially intended for military duty, analysts said the technology design and manufacturing know-how that went into the chip would soon trickle down into the U.S. commercial electronics market.
“This shows that there is still some technology leadership left in the U.S.,” said Jim Feldhan, an analyst with In-Stat Inc., a Scottsdale, Ariz., semiconductor market research firm. “It shows that some companies still know how to design, manufacture and produce advanced semiconductors.”
The chip was developed under a $75-million Defense Department grant whose objective, in part, was to spur advances in the U.S. semiconductor industry. In recent years, the industry has fallen behind that of the Japanese, leaving the Pentagon, among others, dependent on Japanese chip makers for key parts. That’s a position the military has found dangerous and frightening.
The chip unveiled Wednesday contains 4 million devices, each half a micron wide. (A micron is a millionth of a meter.) In addition, the chip can perform 200 million mathematical calculations per second.
“Two hundred million operations per second mean the CPUAX is the computational equivalent of some supercomputers that fill an entire room, require elaborate refrigeration systems and weigh several tons,” said Thomas A. Zimmerman, director of the TRW program under which the chip was developed.
Further, the device, when paired with a companion chip, can repair its own flaws by itself, an achievement TRW said was an industry first.
The chip was manufactured in limited quantities by Motorola at its Advanced Products Research and Development Laboratory in Austin, Tex.
TRW said initial applications for the chip would be as the central brain of an advanced spacecraft or in the noses of jet fighters or missiles. Commercial successors of the device would include applications where high speed, small size and great computing power and reliability are needed, including computer-aided design, medical diagnosis, plant process control and complex imaging.
