PicoChip
Picochip was a venture-backed fabless semiconductor company based in Bath, England, founded in 2000. In January 2012 Picochip was acquired by Mindspeed Technologies, Inc and subsequently by Intel. The company was active in two areas, with two distinct product families. Picochip was one of the first companies to start developing solutions for small cell basestation (femtocells), for homes and offices. These help combat reception issues such as: dropped calls, poor sound quality, delays, and slow downloads. The idea is to increase the capacity of cellular networks and to address coverage holes. Multi-core DSP Picochip developed a multi-core digital signal processor, the picoArray. This integrates 250–300 individual DSP cores onto a single die (depending on the specific product) and as such it can be described as a Massively parallel processor array. Each of these cores is a 16-bit processor with Harvard architecture, local memory and 3-way VLIW. Although each device contained 250–300 processors, the architecture allowed devices to be connected to form far larger systems, in some cases with tens of thousands of cores. The company had three multi-core DSP products (PC202 / 203 / 205) that delivered approximately 40 GMACS and 200 GIPS of performance. The earlier PC102 is obsolete.