LSI Logic puts ASIC design on the fast track

SAN MATEO, CALIF. - LSI Logic Corp. this week will roll out its first RapidChip product, part of a new class of semicustom chip platforms that fit somewhere between full-fledged ASICs and field-programmable gate arrays.

The RapidChip products combine both hard-macro functional blocks and a fabric of undedicated five-transistor protogates on the die. Like a gate array, the chip is fabricated up through the lower metal layers and then held. Customer designs are implemented by interconnecting the intellectual-property (IP) blocks and gates in the upper five metal layers.

Dubbed StreamSlice, the first LSI silicon platform comes with a set of prefabricated intellectual-property cores that LSI thinks will be needed by most OEMs building switches and routers. These include embedded memory, external memory interfaces, phase-locked loops and I/Os with clock data recovery circuitry.

Beyond that, designers have 3 million ASIC gates at their disposal for embedding...