New ATOLL Status Update, Aug 3rd, 2001

Yes, we know, we have been quiet for a long, long time. The reason is simple: we worked on the chip! After problems with our industry partner last year, we needed some time to get back on our feet. We had to find a new fab for our chip, new partners for custom parts of the chip, etc. These problems have been solved in March this year.

The ASIC Design Service Group of IMEC, Belgium has been contracted to prepare the chip layout, and a group of analog IC experts from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany is designing some special, high-performance I/O cells for ATOLL.
We then started in spring to rework the chip in a way, we could fabricate it at our new IC fab: UMC, Taiwan. Since some of our design goals were outdated, we also had to change some parameters and technologies used for the ASIC to have a state-of-the-art chip.

Some features you might like are:

• the ATOLL card now has a PCI-X interface. This gives you 1 Gbyte/s bandwidth on the I/O bus, and the good news is, that the ATOLL NIC can really use this additional bandwidth with its four bi-dir links, each providing 500 Mbyte/s. The NIC is still compatible with normal PCI slots.
• the clock frequency is programmable. We plan to put a cooling fan onto the chip, too. This should enable us to push clock rates from the normal 250 MHz to 300 MHz and beyond.
• we moved from 0.25um technology to 0.18um, which will further lower power consumption and enable faster clock rates.

We have never been so close to a working chip than at this time. We have entered the last design stage a few days ago, the layout generation of the ATOLL ASIC. You can have a look at a first plot of the layout here. You can see the I/O ring, together with the unplaced core and power rails.
There is still lots of work to do, but we're on a good way. We expect to have the layout finished in about 10 weeks.

The ATOLL team