A little more than a week after long-simmering programmable logic startup Tabula Inc. emerged from stealth mode, Tier Logic Inc. stepped into the light Wednesday (March 10), offering the first details about its technology, which employs a novel processing change to build FPGA and ASIC products on a single die.
Like Tabula, Tier Logic's technology depends on a three-dimensional structure. But while Tabula uses rapid reconfiguration to, in the words of that firm's executives, treat time as the third dimension, Tier Logic's approach separates user circuits and configuration circuits into 3-D stacked layers, creating what the company calls the world's first monolithic 3-D FPGA.