Tabula was an American fabless

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical conductivity value falling between that of a conductor, such as copper, and an insulator, such as glass. Its resistivity falls as its temperature rises; metals behave in the opposite way. ...

company based in

Santa Clara, California Santa Clara (; Spanish for " Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 census, making it the eighth-most populous city in the Bay Area. Located in the southern Bay Area, the cit ...

. Founded in 2003 by Steve Teig (ex- CTO of

Cadence In Western musical theory, a cadence (Latin ''cadentia'', "a falling") is the end of a phrase in which the melody or harmony creates a sense of full or partial resolution, especially in music of the 16th century onwards.Don Michael Randel (199 ...

), it raised $215 million in

venture funding Venture capital financing is a type of funding by venture capital. It is private equity capital that can be provided at various stages or funding rounds. Common funding rounds include early-stage seed funding in high-potential, growth companies ( ...

. The company designed and built

three dimensional Three-dimensional space (also: 3D space, 3-space or, rarely, tri-dimensional space) is a geometric setting in which three values (called ''parameters'') are required to determine the position of an element (i.e., point). This is the informa ...

field programmable gate arrays (3-D FPGAs) and ranked third on the Wall Street Journal's annual "Next Big Thing" list in 2012.

Products

Tabula developed

ABAX A sand table uses constrained sand for modelling or educational purposes. The original version of a sand table may be the abax used by early Greek students. In the modern era, one common use for a sand table is to make terrain models for milita ...

, a family of

three-dimensional integrated circuit A three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D IC) is a MOS (metal-oxide semiconductor) integrated circuit (IC) manufactured by stacking as many as 16 or more ICs and interconnecting them vertically using, for instance, through-silicon vias (TSVs) or ...

s. The company's field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips were marketed as 3-D

programmable logic device A programmable logic device (PLD) is an electronic component used to build reconfigurable digital circuits. Unlike digital logic constructed using discrete logic gates with fixed functions, a PLD has an undefined function at the time of manu ...

s or 3PLDs. The chips have 220-630 thousand 4-input lookup table (LUT) from the user point of view and are capable of working at 1.6 GHz physical clock speed. They also contain up to 1280 digital signal processing (DSP) blocks with 18x18 multipliers with pre-adder; up to 920

GPIO A general-purpose input/output (GPIO) is an uncommitted digital signal pin on an integrated circuit or electronic circuit (e.g. MCUs/ MPUs ) board which may be used as an input or output, or both, and is controllable by software. GPIOs have no ...

pins and 48

SerDes {{Use American English, date = March 2019 A Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes) is a pair of functional blocks commonly used in high speed communications to compensate for limited input/output. These blocks convert data between serial data and paral ...

channels (up to 6.5 Gbit/s). ABAX are produced using 40 nm

TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semiconductor company, the world' ...

process and packaged in

flip-chip Flip chip, also known as controlled collapse chip connection or its abbreviation, C4, is a method for interconnecting dies such as semiconductor devices, IC chips, integrated passive devices and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), to externa ...

packages with 1936 or 1156 pins. Internally, ABAX chips use high-frequency (1.6 GHz) reconfiguration between up to 8 config states, named ''folds'', to emulate a high number of FPGA-resources. If all 8 folds are used to get maximum LUT capacity, user visible clock speed will be 200 MHz; for 4 folds capacity is halved but frequency is doubled and so on. Volume price of ABAX chips was planned in 2012 to be in the range of 100-200 USD. Tabula also offered some network solutions, such as: 100 or 40 Gb Ethernet to

Interlaken Interlaken (; lit.: ''between lakes'') is a Swiss town and municipality in the Interlaken-Oberhasli administrative district in the canton of Bern. It is an important and well-known tourist destination in the Bernese Oberland region of the Swiss A ...

bridges; high-speed packet search engines; and multiport 10 gigabit Ethernet processors (which could be used as switch, router, or programmable NIC). In February 2012, Tabula confirmed it would use 22-nm manufacturing process on

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

's Factories. As of July 2013, only 5 companies were allowed to use Intel's manufacturing process:

Achronix Achronix Semiconductor is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California with an additional R&D facility in Bangalore, India, and an additional sales office in Shenzhen, China. Achronix is a diversified fabless semicond ...

; Tabula;

Netronome Netronome is a privately held fabless semiconductor company specializing in the design of network flow processors used for intelligent flow processing in network and communications devices, such as switches, routers and cyber security application ...

;

Microsemi Microsemi Corporation was an Aliso Viejo, California-based provider of semiconductor and system solutions for aerospace & defense, communications, data center and industrial markets. In February 2018, it was announced that Chandler, Arizona-bas ...

; and

Altera Altera Corporation was a manufacturer of programmable logic devices (PLDs) headquartered in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1983 and acquired by Intel in 2015. The main product lines from Altera were the flagship Stratix series, mid-ran ...

.Rogoway, Mike (2013-07-27). Intel dabbles in contract manufacturing, weighing tradeoffs. The Oregonian, July 27, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2013/07/intel_dabbles_in_contract_manu.html. ''Spacetime'' was a product of Tabula that possibly went beyond the abilities of FPGAs. The company said that Spacetime represented two spatial dimensions and one time dimension as a unified 3D framework. According to Tabula, this appeared to be a simplification that might deliver in production a new category of programmable devices (“3PLDs”) that are denser, faster, and more capable than FPGAs, yet still accompanied by software that automatically maps traditional RTL onto these novel fabrics. On 24 March 2015, Tabula officially shut down.Donato-Weinstein, Nathan (2015-02-11). Tabula to shut down; 120 jobs lost at fabless chip company. Silicon Valley Business Journal, 11 February 2015. Retrieved from https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/02/11/tabula-to-shut-down-120-jobs-lost-at-fabless-chip.html.

References

External links

*
Steve Teig Lecture on Tabula and Entrepreneurship to Stanford University Students
2013.10.23
Steve Teig Lecture on Spacetime 3D Programmable Integrated Circuits
(11 min), 2012.06.18
Steve Teig Lecture on Spacetime 3D Programmable Integrated Circuits
(61 min), 2012.10.07 {{Programmable Logic Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States Fabless semiconductor companies Electronic design automation companies Reconfigurable computing Manufacturing companies based in California Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Companies based in Santa Clara, California Electronics companies established in 2003 Electronics companies disestablished in 2015 2003 establishments in California 2015 disestablishments in California Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area

Products

See also

References

External links