Cirrus Logic
| Cirrus Logic Inc.
|
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|---|---|
 |
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| legal form | Inc. |
| ISIN | US1727551004 |
| founding | 1981 |
| Seat |
Austin , United States
|
| Number of employees | 1104 |
| sales | $ 714 million (2014) |
| Branch | Semiconductor manufacturer |
| Website | Cirrus Logic |
Cirrus Logic is a fabless semiconductor manufacturer. The company was founded in 1981 as Patil Systems, Inc. by Suhas S. Patil in Salt Lake City / Utah . It was renamed Cirrus Logic when the company moved to Silicon Valley in 1984 . The current headquarters are in Austin / Texas .
The product range currently consists mainly of audio DSPs . In the past, however, Cirrus Logic also manufactured modem chips, controller chips for optical drives, sound chips for sound cards and, above all, graphics chips.
history
In the early 1990s, Cirrus Logic was a leading supplier of low-cost PC graphics chips. Cirrus ' Windows accelerators were among the fastest in the low-end market segment and outperformed competitors' VGA chips (such as Oak Technology , Trident Microsystems, and Paradise Western Digital ). The Cirrus GD-5422 (1992) supported hardware acceleration in both the 256 color and high color display mode (65,536 colors) and was thus one of the cheapest SVGA controllers that supported both display modes.
In the mid-1990s, when the industry switched to the PCI bus, S3 and Trident Microsystems caught up with Cirrus . When the announced sales date for the GD-5470 Mondello could not be met, Cirrus' reputation fell. Mondello would have been Cirrus' first 3D graphics accelerator.
The company's final line of graphics chips, called the GD-546x Laguna , used RDRAM instead of conventional SDRAM . Perspective Texture Mapping, Bilinear Filtering , Single-Pass Lightning, Gouraud Shading, and Alpha Blending capabilities were both slow and incompletely implemented.
In 2014, Cirrus Logic bought the UK company Wolfson Microelectronics for £ 291 million.
Graphics chips
Desktop
- CL-GD5410 - Alias: Cyrix XpressGraphics (integrated in Cyrix Cx86, Alias: MediaGX CPU) 2112 kb memory
- CL-GD5420 - ISA-SVGA chipset, highly integrated ( RAMDAC + PLL), 1 MByte memory
- CL-GD5422 - Extended version of the 5420 (32-bit internal memory interface, hardware BitBLT )
- CL-GD5424 - VLB version of the 5422, but similar to the 5426 in some aspects
- CL-GD5425 - like CL-GD5424, but with TV-Out support ( PAL / NTSC )
- CL-GD5426 - ISA bus and VLB with up to 2 Mbyte memory
- CL-GD5428 - Extended version of the 5426
- CL-GD5429 - Extended version of the 5428; officially supports higher clock rates of the memory and has memory-mapped I / O
- CL-GD5430 - Similar to the 5429, but with 543x core (32 bit host interface)
- CL-GD5434 - Chip of the Alpine family with 64-bit internal memory interface. Supports 64-bit mode only if equipped with 2 Mbyte memory. Last VLB bus chip
- CL-GD5436 - Highly optimized 5434
- CL-GD5440 - Similar to the 5430, it also has a video accelerator
- CL-GD54M40 - Low cost version of the 5440 in a 160 pin housing
- CL-GD5446 - Another member of the Alpine family of 2D accelerators; 5436 extended by video accelerator, EDO-Ram, the video front-end chip PX4072 is a relabeled VPX3216 from ITT
- CL-GD546X - The Laguna VisualMedia family of 3D accelerators (5464 = PCI, 5465 = AGP). These chips use RDRAM . The 5462 is a 2D accelerator including a BitBLT engine, video windows and a 64 × 64 HW cursor
- CL-GD5480 - uses SGRAM , max. 4 MB, 64 bits wide
Notebook
- CL-GD6410 / 6420/6440 - Used in some notebooks, similar to older Cirrus chipsets (5410 / AVGA2)
- CL-GD6205 / 6215/6225/6235 - Compatible with the 5420
- CL-GD7541 / 7542/7543/7548 - Compatible with the 5427 / 3x
Web links
- Cirrus Logic on cirrus.com (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ CRUS Profile - Cirrus Logic, Inc. Stock . Yahoo! Finance. Retrieved July 14, 2015.
- ↑ heise.de of April 29, 2014, Audio-Chip-Fusion: Cirrus Logic takes over Wolfson , accessed on August 1, 2020.