Silicon Graphics, Incorporated

Agate Logic, Inc.

Ronald Nicholson

Timothy J Van Hook

Steven Winegarden

Gulbin Ezer

Sudhaker Rao

John Jun Yu

The present invention provides architectures for hybrid integrated circuits and methods for producing these hybrid integrated circuits that contain both field programmable gate arrays and mask programmable gate arrays, a form of application specific integrated circuits. Methods for producing an integrated circuit that is field programmable as well as mask programmable include the steps of: designing wafer bank layers and finishing layers, where the wafer bank layers provide a plurality of selectable functional blocks; fabricating said wafer bank layers; designing mask programmed interconnect layers for said integrated circuit, where the interconnect layers interconnect selected ones of the plurality of functional blocks from the wafer bank layers; fabricating the interconnect layers on the wafer bank layers; and fabricating the finishing layers on the interconnect layers to produce the integrated circuit. Architectures for these integrated circuits can contain a field programmable gate array that is integrated with a mask programmable gate array in a ring structure.

Hybrid integrated circuits and their methods of fabrication

A media coprocessor for performing 3-D graphics, video, and audio functions. The media coprocessor is comprised of a single IC semiconductor chip which is coupled with a host processor chip, one or more memory chips, and an I/O controller chip. The media coprocessor includes a digital bitstream processor, a digital signal processor, and a display processor. An update interval, synchronized to a video frame, is defined. This update interval is divided into a number of partitions. Audio data is processed during one of the partitions. Video data is processed during another partition. And 3-D graphics is processed in another partition. Thereby, the processing is performed in a sequential, time-division multiplex scheme whereby the single media coprocessor chip processes all three partitions in a single video frame.

Media coprocessor with graphics video and audio tasks partitioned by time division multiplexing

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Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Ronald Nicholson