Inmos
| Inmos Ltd. | |
|---|---|
| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | November 1978 |
| resolution | December 1994 |
| Reason for dissolution | Takeover by competitors |
| Seat | Bristol , England |
| management | Iann Baron |
| Branch | Semiconductor industry |
Inmos Ltd. was a British semiconductor manufacturer based in Bristol . The company was founded in November 1978 by Iann Baron . The company developed the transputer .
history
The company was founded by Iann Brannon, a British computer consultant, and the two Americans Richard Petritz and Paul Schroeder. Petritz and Schroeder both had years of experience in the semiconductor industry. The UK Government's National Enterprise Board made £ 50 million available for this. In addition to the parent company in England, the US subsidiary Inmos Corporation was founded in Colorado. Semiconductor factories were built in Colorado Springs , Colorado and Newport , Wales . Under Margaret Thatcher's privatization policy , the National Enterprise Board was incorporated into the British Technology Group and had to sell its shares in Inmos. Initially, the offers from AT&T and a Dutch consortium of companies were rejected. In July 1984 the Thorn EMI company offered £ 124.1 million for the state’s 76% stake. This offer was later increased to £ 192 million and accepted in August 1984. In total, Inmos had received £ 211m from the British government by then, but was still not in the black.
In April 1989 Inmos was sold to SGS-Thomson . Around the same time, the company began working on the T9000 - an improved version of the Transputer. However, due to various technical problems and delays, the project was discontinued and thus marked the end of the Transputer as a parallel processor platform. Modifications of the processor such as the ST20 were later integrated into chipsets for embedded systems such as set-top boxes .
In December 1994 Inmos was fully incorporated into STMicroelectronics and the name Inmos has not been used since then.
Products
Inmos initially manufactured SRAM modules. Later, DRAM - and EEPROM building blocks it. But Iann Baron's long-term goal was to develop a new microprocessor architecture that was designed for parallelization of computing processes. Employees David May and Robert Milne were entrusted with this task . In 1985 the newly developed processor type in the form of the processors T212 and T414 went into production. The Occam programming language was created especially for the new processor type.
The transputer achieved some success as the basis for various supercomputers from Meiko, Floating Point Systems , Parsytec and Parsys . Meiko was a company founded by former Inmos employees. Since the processor had a self-contained design, it was also used in some embedded systems. However, the unconventional nature of the processor and its programming language greatly detracted from its appeal. At the end of the 1980s, the processor could no longer keep up with the performance of competing products.
In addition to the transputer processors, Inmos manufactured DSPs and RAMDACs . The RAMDAC Inmos G171 was used by IBM when building the VGA graphics card for the PS / 2 systems.
Web links
- INMOS and the transputer part 1 and part 2 - Iann Barron in conversation with the British Computer Society from 1998 (English)
- Website former employee of Inmos (English)
literature
- Arthur Trew, Greg Wilson: Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computing Systems , Springer-Verlag New York 1991, ISBN 0-387-19664-1
- Mick McClean, Tom Rowland: The Inmos Saga , Quorum Books 1986, ISBN 978-0899301655
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Wayne Sandholtz: High-Tech Europe: The Politics of International Cooperation , Berkeley University of California Press 1992, p. 155
- ↑ Thorn-EMI Will Buy A 76% Stake in Inmos. ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: New York Times, July 13, 1984, accessed December 12, 2008
- ↑ Kevin Smith: Inmos Forced to Get Off the Dole. In: Electronics of September 22, 1983
