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THE CRUSOE CHIP BY TRANSMETA

Transmeta designed its Crusoe microprocessor (chip) largely or portable devices
that will supplement desktop PCs as a common means of connecting to the Inter-
net. The Crusoe chip was built for mobile applications, and Transmeta claims that
the processor can efficiently run software programs designed for larger Pentium
chips (e.g., Windows or Linux), while consuming less electricity and generating less
heat.
In January 2001, Transmeta introduced three types of Crusoe chip, the TM3200,
the TM5400, and the TM5600. The smallest (TM3200) is designed for handheld de-
vices such as smartphones and pocket computers. The larger and faster TM5400 and
TM5600 are designed to run Linux or Windows on notebook computers.
The Crusoe chip has its own instruction-set architecture, based on Transmeta’s
proprietary 128-bit VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture and design. The
Transmeta design does have advantages over traditional microprocessors. The VLIW
instruction set is smaller and lacks many of the specialized instructions that Intel has
added to the Pentium series to optimize it for specific tasks like streaming multimedia.
That lowers the overall transistor count, reducing power consumption and generating
less heat. A TM5400 chip in an idle personal computer consumes about 16 percent of
the power used by an Intel Mobile Pentium III in the same personal computer. For
Web browsing and playing DVDs and MP3s, the TM5400 consumes between 20 and
30 percent of the power that the Mobile Pentium III does.
Software written for Intel x86 chips will not run directly on Crusoe chips. Instead,
Crusoe chips run one custom software program, written by Transmeta. This program
dynamically translates x86 instructions into Crusoe instructions, then executes them.
Transmeta calls this process “code morphing.” The code-morphing software is stored
on a reprogrammable Flash ROM chip, making it easy to upgrade the software with-
out having to buy replacement hardware.
The Crusoe chip executes the entire range of x86 instructions by using its code-
morphing software. For example, the code-morphing software might need to trans-
late one complex Pentium instruction into 15 VLIW instructions. However, most of
the time, there is a one-to-one correspondence between x86 instructions and VLIW
instructions.
In fact, the Crusoe chip can outperform this one-to-one ratio. With simple x86 in-
structions, the code-morphing software can put four of Intel’s 32-bit x86 instructions
into a single 128-bit VLIW instruction and execute them simultaneously. Therefore, the
Crusoe chip might be slower with a few complex instructions, but it makes up for lost
time with simpler instructions. (Source: Red Herring, March 2000; Red Herring, Octo-
ber 30, 2000; Red Herring, February 13, 2001; MIT Technology Review, November/
December 2000.)

DNA CHIPS
DNA microarrays or DNA chips appeared in 1996 when Affymetrix introduced the
first commercial version, which the company called GeneChip. Affymetrix used light-
sensitive chemical reactions to grow a grid-like pattern of as many as 400,000 short
DNA strands, called probes, on a glass wafer. Since each probe can bind to a different
gene sequence in a sample of DNA, the chips allow researchers to perform what once
would have been thousands of separate experiments all at the same time. DNA chips
open up new possibilities: new understanding of the role genes play in heart disease or
antibiotic resistance; tools for prenatal or infection diagnosis that incorporate all the
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genes of interest on a single chip; and massive-scale automated screening of potential

drugs. Advantages of DNA chips include:
• They work in parallel, processing all possible answers at the same time.
• They are fast.
• They are energy-efficient. Conventional chips waste about a billion times more en-
ergy per operation than do DNA chips.
• They have a huge storage capacity. One gram of DNA can hold the data of a tril-
lion CDs.

Example of How DNA Chips Work

1. Start with a group of patients, some of whom have one type of cancer and some of
whom have another.
2. For each patient, take a sample of cancer cells and isolate all the genes that are ac-
tive in those cells. Make copies of those genes, incorporating some special nu-
cleotides, or DNA letters (DNA bases), that have a fluorescent dye attached to
them.
3. Put the new gene copies onto a DNA microarray, a chip covered with a grid of several
thousand probes—short stretches of DNA that each bind to a unique gene sequence.
4. When a probe matches one of the genes that are active in the cancer cells, it binds
to the copy of that gene. Once binding takes place, wash away the extra free-
floating DNA.
5. Put the DNA chip into the chip scanner. There, a laser shines light on the chip and
causes the fluorescent dye to glow, making a pattern of light spots where labeled
gene copies are bound to probes and dark spots where there are unbound probes.
The scanner detects the fluorescence and records an image of the grid of light and
dark.
6. Using a computer that has been fed a map of where each probe is on the microar-
ray, you can determine which genes are active in each sample. Careful analysis of
these results can allow you to pinpoint small sets of genes that are active in one
cancer but not the other. In the future, these genes could become targets for new
drugs, or could be the basis for new, highly specific diagnostic tests.

OPTICAL COMPUTING
In today’s chips, data move on pathways made of very thin strands of metal (alu-
minum or copper). In the very near future, the most critical of those pathways could
be replaced with fiber circuits carrying tiny pulses of laser light. It may even be possi-
ble to dispense with some of the fibers and wires altogether and move laser light
through open circuits within the chip.
This change could be critical. The speed of computer chips could reach an absolute
barrier in the next decade. The barrier will vary because how much data a wire can
transmit is determined by a ratio of wire length and thickness. If a wire is too long or
thin, the bandwidth will be low. Part of the problem is the physical properties of
metal. Metal interconnects can allow data to move only so fast. Optical interconnects
may then have to take the place of metal ones wherever bottlenecks may occur. In ef-
fect, researchers want to add optical express lanes to conventional chips.
Electricity moves slower through a metal wire than light moves through the air or
an optical fiber. That is because electrical properties such as resistance limit the
throughput of metal wires and also produce a lot of heat. Light has another key ad-
vantage: Many different frequencies of light can be sent down the same fiber. Such
multiplexing, which is done routinely in telecommunications, could allow several
metal wires to be replaced by just one fiber that can transmit just as much data.
In optical systems, laser light pulses carry data. Researchers want to develop a sili-
con laser that can be integrated within the chip and be flicked on and off to produce
these pulses. Researchers in Europe and the United States have recently discovered
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techniques to get silicon to amplify light and then emit it with some efficiency, key
steps toward a silicon laser.
Another problem is that silicon lasers must be powered by electricity coming from
other parts of the chip, a problem that has not been solved. Further, a way to route
data within an optical chip is, as yet, unknown. In traditional chips, the flow of current
around the circuits is governed by the transistors, which are tiny switches. Making
analogous optical devices on the tiny scale demanded by chip-making is a break-
through waiting to be achieved.

RECONFIGURABLE PROCESSORS
So far, no one has figured out how to produce a chip that meets all the criteria for the
ultimate consumer device. Such a chip would have to have flexibility, high perfor-
mance, low power consumption, and low cost, and would need to get to the market
quickly before the multiple features it supported became outdated.
Now a new kind of chip may reshape the semiconductor arena. The chip adapts to
any programming task by effectively erasing its hardware design and regenerating
new hardware that is perfectly suited to run the software at hand. These chips, re-
ferred to as reconfigurable processors, could tilt the balance of power that has pre-
served a decade-long standoff between programmable chips and hard-wired custom
chips. These new chips are able to rewire themselves on the fly to create the exact
hardware needed to run a piece of software at the utmost speed.
If silicon can become dynamic, then so will the devices. No longer will you have to
buy a camera and a tape recorder. You could just buy one device and then download
a new function for it when you want to take some pictures or make a recording.
These chips are programmable logic devices with hardware that can be rewritten
hundreds of times a second. Each has two parts: one hat serves as a quickly accessible
library, or cache, for hardware components, and another that is like a blank chalk-
board. As needed, the chip takes a hardware component from the library and places it
onto the blank chalkboard. There, the component executes the software running at
the moment. When it is finished, the hardware component is erased, and a new com-
ponent is placed in to process the next piece of software.
It takes complex scheduling to map the right piece of hardware into the chalkboard
at exactly the right time. But the advantages are potentially huge. The chip can be
smaller because its chalkboard allows it to fetch hardware components from memory,
meaning that it does not use valuable chip space to store the entire library of hard-
ware components, as a microprocessor does. Without such a chalkboard, a micro-
processor has the whole library in place and drawing electricity at all times, even
though only 1 to 5 percent is being used at any given time. By contrast, a reconfig-
urable chip uses only the piece of hardware that it needs at any one time, and it uses
power only for the active function.

MOLECULAR COMPUTING
In this new field—which merges the technologies of electrical engineering and the ma-
terials of physical chemistry—individual molecules take the place of switches etched
on silicon wafers. Because the molecules are roughly one-millionth the size of today’s
silicon switches, computing could be performed in tiny spaces using far less power.
Molecular switches are easily grown in mass quantities, require very little power, and
are relatively cheap. Silicon switches are expensive, larger, slower to produce, and re-
quire much power.

INTELLIGENT RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY (IRAM)

This advance in chip design combines a microprocessor and a memory chip on a single
silicon wafer. University of California at Berkeley Professor Dave Patterson invented
the chip, and IBM will fabricate the prototype. The plan was to begin testing the pro-
totype at the end of 2001 in applications such as multimedia and portable systems.
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The chip may accelerate the market for a new generation of handheld computers that
would combine wireless communications, television, speech recognition, graphics, and
video games. One application is to leverage IRAM so that a handheld like the Palm
can be used as a tape recorder with speech recognition and file-index capabilities.
IRAM has the potential for removing the bottleneck that has restrained processing
speeds in microprocessors. Over the last two decades, the speed of microprocessors
has increased more than 100 times. But, while memory chips (DRAMs) have kept
pace in terms of capacity, their speed has increased by only a factor of ten. As a result,
microprocessors spend more time waiting for data and less time doing valuable com-
putations. As the gap between speeds widens, methods to help alleviate the problem,
like memory caching, are becoming less useful.