Intel and eASIC: Marriage or Just Good Friends?

By SemiWiki

May 15, 2015

A couple of days ago Intel announced a collaboration with eASIC. Here is the opening paragraph of the press release:

Intel Corporation today announced plans to develop integrated products with eASIC Corporation that combine processing performance and customizable hardware to meet the increasing demand for custom compute solutions for data centers and the "cloud." The new parts will enable acceleration of up to two times that of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) for workloads like security and big data analytics while also speeding the time to market for custom application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) development by as much as 50 percent.

Nowhere in the press release does it say whether or not Intel will be manufacturing parts for eASIC nor whether the intention is to integrate the eASIC technology onto the same die as the microprocessor. My guess would be that the plan is to use some sort of package-in-package technology but that they will be separate die. In the past eASIC has used Fujitsu and GlobalFoundries for manufacture and the most advanced arrays they have are at 28nm.

The first conclusion that everyone has leapt to is that this Intel's reaction to its failure to acquire Altera recently. I don't think that this is true.

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