STMicroelectronics is this week celebrating 20 years of its design centre in Bristol. The building was opened by Inmos in 1986 before the company was bought by ST in 1989, and has housed the teams that developed the transputer, Chameleon media-processor and the ST40 processor cores.
The Advanced R&D Centre is one of 16 in ST and currently houses 200 engineers and designers working on the latest processor and chip technology for HD DVD, Blu ray, DVD recorders and set-top box designs, as well as chips for GPS satellite navigation systems, printers and embedded wireless networking. The transputer lives on as the ST20+ core in many digital set-top boxes, while the site is also recruiting wireless LAN designers to support the design centre in Reading that came with the acquisition of start-up Synad.
“The technologies that we develop here become fundamental technologies in a whole range of products as both chips and technology blocks,” said Greville Commins, marketing manager for CPU cores.
The Chameleon architecture was part of the technology that was spun off with the SuperH joint venture with Hitachi to develop the SH5/ST50 core, but there will not be an ST50 for the foreseeable future, said Commins. Instead the technology is being used for new versions of the ST40 and ST200 VLIW signal processing cores.
“There’s been a lot of development and continuity and reuse of the technology that is integrated into products throughout ST,” said Commins.
Many players have worked at the Bristol site, including Professor David May, Hussein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination Technologies and Chris Boyce of Dedicated Micros.