Silicon Logic Engineering receives funding for advanced ASICs

Based in Eau Claire, Silicon Logic Engineering (SLE) provides ASIC design services and markets high-speed network intellectual property. Its venture award, announced earlier this month, was from Advantage Capital Wisconsin Partners I (Madison) and Banc One Stonehenge Capital Fund Wisconsin (Milwaukee).

The award was a new laurel, both for high tech in Wisconsin and for the design team that built Cray Research's first CMOS supercomputer.

The funding will support additional research in high-speed CMOS, a subject Jeff West, SLE's president and founder, called near and dear to the needs of his customers. That custo mer list includes companies like Nortel Networks, Silicon Graphics Inc. (which owned Cray Research from 1996 to 2000) and others. "These are people on the high end who depend on ultrahigh performance," said West.

CMOS specialists

Founded in 1996, SLE has always specialized in high-speed CMOS circuitry. The company includes between 80 and 90 percent of the original engineering team that built the first "entry-level" supercomputer, the Cray ELS, in the early '90s. "It was a combination of good chemistry and good talent that kept us together," West said.

ASICs for the original CMOS supercomputer — 100,000 gates in 0.5-micron technology, a spectacular achievement for its time — seem modest by today's standards. SLE (an anagram of ELS, West confesses) is now architecting devices with 14 million logic gates in 0.11-micron geometries.

"Think physical," West frequently tells his team — the same advice he gave them when they were transforming the bipolar ECL Cray Y-MP of the '80s into a cooler-running machine with CMOS. The ELS took seven years to develop, West recalled, requiring the conversion of long bipolar register chains into shorter CMOS FIFOs. Though performance was somewhat lower than the $15 million supercomputer, the $200,000 ELS was every bit software-compatible with the Y-MP, enabling universities and non-government research facilities to acquire their own supercomputers.

"One trouble with working with high-end customers," West said of his current work, "is that you can't talk about what you're doing for two years after it's done." But one accomplishment that continues to draw attention is a Phase 2 system packet interface (SPI-4), a physical interface device for OC-192 (10-Gbit/second) optical networks. SLE's licensing of this device to network system builders may position the company more as a comms intellectual property provider than as a design services company. But a standard-cell approach to the design of application-specific standard products — a methodology SLE calls ASICBlaster — maintains a design services orientation, focused on high-performance and rapid turnaround time.

In a statement congratulating SLE on its certified capital companies, or Capco, award, Wisconsin Gov. Scott McCallum called the investments "exactly what we need to grow the type of high-paying jobs that we need for a strong future."

SLE was among 13 new companies receiving seed money under Capco. Legislation in 1998 provided $50 million in tax credits for insurance companies that invested in qualified firms. To qualify, companies had to be based in Wisconsin, need venture capital and be unable to obtain conventional financing. They also had to have 100 employees or fewer, a net income of no more than $2 million per year and a net worth not more than $5 million.