Mannerisms

A picoChip guy tells me: “Pete is the soul of picoChip”.

Pete is Peter Claydon, picoChip's disarmingly self-effacing co-founder and COO.

“I don’t like arrogant people”, Claydon tells me over a pint of Gem in a Bath pub.

Probably to ensure that arrogance didn’t get into picoChip, he interviewed the company’s first fifty employees.

What did he look for? “You know when you meet someone whether they can do something well, whatever it may be,” Claydon replies.

Now the company is 140 strong what does he do? “I do whatever needs to be done”, he says, “I’ve always done that. Before we had cleaners I cleaned the toilets.”

It's a Noycean philosophy; the respect for excellence; the disdain for the trappings of hierarchy.

Did he found the company to make money? “I don’t want money, but I want commercial success because that’s how an engineer measures success”, replies Claydon, “I tell the VCs I want money, because that’s what they want to hear, but it’s not money, it’s the success of the company in commercial terms that I want.”

As well as being the company's soul, he’s the inventor of its multi-core processing technology.

Asked how that came about he replies: “In our case our architecture was very accidental. When I joined Brooktree I was the 12th employee and the first who hadn’t come from Inmos, and people solved problems in this Inmos-y type of way. They thought parallel processing was the way to do it.”

“I know about simple processors, and I know there’s no chance of my designing a complicated processor, so clearly the only way to get performance was to design a lot of simple processors,” he adds.

He looked into the physics of what would be the optimal number of transistors per processor for performance efficiency and decided that 1m was optimal.

“The emphasis was on doing something elegant, a clean, clever architecture which was really easy to programme”, he says, “we’ve solved that problem of how to programme it. We have a single programming environment.”

“David May (architect of the Inmos Transputer) has a pipeline between processors which takes stuff in and chucks stuff out”, says Claydon, “if one processor is expecting data from another, and doesn’t get it, it stops and waits, and if one processor hasn’t got the data, it stops and waits, but with picoChip’s synchro-mesh kind of system, it can still do processing. David May is interested in being academically sound, whereas the PicoArray was a pragmatic approach to parallel processing.”

The key is the interconnect. picoChip uses a switching bus matrix so that every processor can talk to every other processor, or can talk to only one other processor, or can talk to just a few processors.

The biggest commercial system the company has built is a 5,000 processor system, and it has built a 50,000 processor system in which all the processors are capable of talking to eachother. The architecture allows processor numbers to be expanded ad infinitum

The pragmatic approach to parallel processing met its application in the Belvedere, another of Bath’s pubs.

“Doug Pulley (co-founder of picoChip) set out to solve problems in wireless. We were meeting every week in the Belvedere and drinking lots of beer, and talking about how we could use this to solve the problem of making things better in wireless,” says Claydon.

The wireless application was only because Pulley’s interest was wireless.

“The architecture is applicable to any DSP problem., it can address any DSP problem”, says Claydon, “now it’s addressing wireless, but our aspiration is to move into other DSP market segments.”

One of these new areas is imaging, and picoChip already has an existing customer using a picoChip chip for ultra-sound imaging. The customer makes 15,000 units a year, each of which uses two picoChip ICs.

So picoChip has two things which can drive it a very long way: a generic technology which can be widely applied; and a soul which reflects the nature and aspirations of engineers.

After a tour of half a dozen pubs, it's approaching midnight and Claydon looks at his watch and stands up. “I’ve got five minutes to catch the last train”, he says.

“I’ve got a taxi waiting outside Pete, take it”, says someone.

No thanks”, says Claydon, “I’ll run”.