News Briefs - Hardware:

Fulcrum Founders Bring Advances To Clockless Chip Design

Fulcrum Microsystems announced its two leading technologists will present the company's latest advances in clockless chip design technology and products at the upcoming Hot Chips and Hot Interconnects symposia.

Interest in clockless chip design is mounting due to the growing problems associated with distributing a clock signal across ever-larger chips. Fulcrum's clockless chips also consume less power, more easily integrate system-on-chip functionality and generally outperform comparable clocked alternatives.

At the Hot Chips Symposium, Uri Cummings, Fulcrum co-founder and vice president of product development, will provide details on the company's first commercial chip. His presentation will focus on the chip's design and architecture, and its complete interoperability with several classes of industry-standard clocked chips. The Hot Chips Symposium will be held on August 17-19 at Stanford University. Mr. Cummings will present on August 18.

Andrew Lines, Fulcrum co-founder and CTO, will present a paper detailing a unique clockless crossbar switch implementation, at the Hot Interconnects Symposium. This switch technology, known as Nexus, can be used to create a globally asynchronous, locally synchronous (GALS) architecture for large-scale system-on-chip designs. GALS is an efficient way to interconnect various processors or DSP elements, and to bridge between different clock domains within these SoC devices. The Hot Interconnects Symposium will be held on August 20-22 at Stanford University. Mr. Lines will present his paper on August 20.