LONDON A Chinese home-grown microprocessor, sometimes called Godson and sometimes called Loongson, has been transferred to a 65-nm manufacturing process technology with help from EDA company Synopsys Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.).
Loongson Technology Co. Ltd., which is funded by the Institute of Computing Technologies of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, achieved first-pass silicon success for its 65-nanometer, multicore Loongson-3 CPU design, according to Synopsys.
Synopsys outlined the significance of its EDA tools in a press release but did not include details of when the tape-out had occurred, whether this was a four- or eight-core chip, or on whose 65-nm process the Loongson-3 chip was implemented. In 2007 an agreement was reached for Loongson chips to be manufactured and marketed by STMicroelectronics NV
Plans had called for Loongson-3 silicon to be produced in 2009 and China hopes to build a petaflops computer based on the chip in 2010. The 65-nm device should be able to run at a clock frequency of between 1.0-GHz and 1.2-GHz with four CPU cores (10W) first and eight cores (20W) later. The four-core version of the Godson-3 was scheduled to tape out before the 2008 with the eight-core version due to tape out in 2009 (see China readies first multicore Godson CPUs).
"The gigahertz clock speed and multicore architecture of the Loongson-3 CPU required precise timing and power simulation to verify its aggressive design targets," said Dr. Hu Wei Wu, principal scientist and program manager of the Loongson project, in the statement issued by Synopsys.
The Loongson/Godson is based on the MIPS instruction set. Development started prior to 2002. MIPS Technologies Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) announced in 2009 that the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences had licensed the MIPS32 and MIPS64 architectures to allow it to develop and commercialize its Loongson family of processors.
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