eSilicon Corporation, a pioneering semiconductor Value Chain Producer (VCP), today announced a successful engagement with high-performance computing (HPC) innovator SiCortex that has enabled SiCortex to introduce a series of breakthrough products capable of up to 6 Teraflops performance with low power operating characteristics. The two companies worked together on the design and manufacture of a complete high performance computing system on a chip, a highly integrated device with more than 350 million transistors. The partnership resulted in a 20-month design-to-tape out cycle, saving SiCortex valuable time, resources and capital in introducing its debut product line. "Partnering with eSilicon helped us to focus on what we do best – creating the innovative product architecture that enabled us to offer breakthrough performance in a unique package to the High Performance Computing marketplace,” said SiCortex CEO Dr. John Mucci. “Since we didn’t have to dedicate precious resources to building a large operations team, we were able to build a complete computer system from the silicon up with a startup-sized budget instead of the billon-dollar budgets required to build new CPUs with a more conventional approach." eSilicon provided support at three critical steps in the development and manufacturing processes. During the development phase, eSilicon worked closely with the SiCortex team on important design elements and processes, including the development and integration of DDR2 Phy IP blocks. eSilicon also performed the design-for-testability (DFT) planning and implementation, ensuring a testable, high quality design. Second, eSilicon managed the handoff and logistics of working with the target foundry, TSMC, providing the start-up with both essential expertise as well as leverage to ramp up their first chips in production at the world’s largest foundry. Finally, eSilicon managed the production flow throughout the rest of the supply chain for SiCortex, overseeing the package design, prototype development, and yield analysis across multiple suppliers. "This is a classic example of the benefits that an outsourcing model gives to a company like SiCortex. By providing them access to world class talent with experience throughout the entire development and manufacturing cycle, SiCortex was able to focus on their core value-add at the system level and leave the details of implementing their ideas in silicon to us. The combination of their innovative concept and our implementation and supply chain experience has led to a highly successful product launch that gives SiCortex a valuable competitive edge in their market," said Hugh Durdan, vice president of marketing at eSilicon. SiCortex has introduced the first computer architecture to recognize that high sustained performance and low power are synergistic, not antagonistic. To realize this vision, SiCortex worked with eSilicon to put a complete cluster node on a single chip, eliminating the enormous heat output that causes serious reliability, performance, and operating cost problems in clusters that rely on existing CPUs. The SC5832 is the first and only computer system that offers 5832 64-bit processors, each dissipating just 600 milliwatts of power, on a single backplane. Six processors are mounted on a single chip, along with all inter-processor communications logic plus two DDR-2 memory controllers and PCI Express I/O logic. Complete with its 8 Terabytes of system memory, the system fits in a single cabinet and requires less than 20 kilowatts of wall power.