Delivering 'open core surgery'

Find the Latest SoC Solutions
for... Automotive... IoT... Security... Audio... Video

Neil Tyler talks to the CEO and founder of Semidynamics and looks at the core architecture they have developed for the RISC-V community.

www.newelectronics.co.uk/, Aug. 29, 2023 – 

Founded in Barcelona in 2016, Semidynamics is a European supplier of high-bandwidth high-performance cores with vector units targeted at machine learning and artificial intelligence applications.

The company's founder and CEO is Roger Espasa, spoke with New Electronics after attending the RISC-V Summit held in Barcelona, earlier this year.

Espasa started his career, having gained a Phd in Computer Science from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in 1997, with the Alpha Microprocessor Group on a vector extension to the Alpha architecture.

The Alpha team was ultimately acquired by Intel and Espasa then found himself working for them until 2014. In that time, he led a team developing a vector extension for the x86 ISA which was initially deployed in the Larrabee and Knight's Corner product and which then became the AVX-512 extension.

He also led the team implementing the texture sampling unit for the original Larrabee chip and worked on the core for the Knight's Landing product (14nm) and led the core development for the follow-on Knights Hill 10nm product.

In 2014, Espasa joined Broadcom but when the project he was working on was scrapped he decided to form his own business and Semidynamics came into being.

"Our first contract was with Esperanto Technologies for whom we developed a 7nm architecture for machine learning. We also helped design the Avispado RISC-V core, which was targeted at high-bandwidth applications and supported an open vector interface to vector processing units," Espasa explains.

click here to read more...

 Back