A computer chip built smaller than a credit card and packed with the power of a room-size supercomputer has been unveiled by TRW Inc. and Motorola Corp.
The new chip first will be used in the military as the brain in spacecraft, missiles and jet fighters, and the makers hope it eventually will help free the United States from reliance on Japanese chipmakers.The chip, called CPUAX for Central Processing Unit - Arithmetic Extended, is expected to enter the commercial electronics market as other technologies catch up.
TRW and Motorola issued a statement saying their chip can perform 200 million operations per second by placing several times more transistors on a chip than ever before.
"Two hundred million operations per second mean the (chip) is the computational equivalent of some supercomputers that fill an entire room, require elaborate refrigeration systems and weigh several tons," said Thomas A. Zimmerman, a research director at TRW, the aerospace and defense company, based in Cleveland.
The chip is packaged at 2.1 inches by 2.1 inches and weighs 1.5 ounces. It has 4 million transistors, each smaller than a light wave, according to TRW and Motorola, the electronics company based in Schaumburg, Ill.
"Commercial successors of the superchip could find use in a wide variety of applications where high speed, small size and great computing power and reliability are needed," Zimmerman said. "Among these are computer-aided design, medical diagnosis, plant process control and complex imaging."
William S. Richardson, executive vice president of Ncube, a computer company based in Beaverton, Ore., that builds such parallel processing supercomputers, said the TRW-Motorola chip "is a pretty impressive system."
"When you put 4 million transistors on a single computer chip . . . that in effect means far higher performance," he said. "It's probably three or four times the number of transistors of anything before."
The chip is able to "repair" glitches in its operations when used in conjunction with a "satellite" chip, essentially by disconnecting the faulty parts of the superchip, the companies said.