Tabula developed
ABAX, a family of
three-dimensional integrated circuits. The company's
field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips were marketed as 3-D
programmable logic devices 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 pins and 48
SerDes channels (up to 6.5 Gbit/s). ABAX are produced using 40 nm
TSMC process and packaged in
flip-chip 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. As of July 2013, only 5 companies were allowed to use Intel's manufacturing process:
Achronix; Tabula; Netronome;
Microsemi; and
Altera.
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. == See also ==