Intrinsity
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Semiconductor |
| Founded | 1997 |
| Defunct | 2010 |
| Fate | Acquired by Apple Inc. |
| Headquarters | Austin , United States |
| Products | Fast14 technology, FastCores (ARM, MIPS, Power ISA cores) |
| Owner | Apple Inc. |
Number of employees | 100 |
Intrinsity, Inc. was a privately owned fabless semiconductor firm headquartered in Austin, Texas, founded in 1997 under the name EVSX, before rebranding in 2000. Employing approximately 100 staff members, the company specialized in providing advanced tools and services for semiconductor logic design aimed at producing microprocessors with enhanced performance, reduced transistor counts, and lower power usage. In April 2010, Apple Inc. completed the acquisition of Intrinsity.
Products
The flagship offering from Intrinsity was its Fast14 technology—a collection of proprietary electronic design automation (EDA) tools that utilized dynamic logic and novel signal encoding techniques to deliver processor speeds surpassing those achievable with conventional static logic designs.
Key elements of Fast14 comprised multi-phase clocking methods to minimize synchronization delays, 1-of-N (one-hot) encoding to improve signal reliability, and sophisticated routing strategies that mitigate noise and optimize timing by distributing delay across multiple gates. The technology also included converters to bridge dynamic and static logic domains, enabling seamless integration with standard components.
Under the FastCores brand, this technology was applied to licensed cores based on ARM, MIPS, and Power ISA architectures. The first product, FastMATH, launched in 2002, was a MIPS-derived digital signal processor-like microprocessor fabricated using 130 nm technology. It operated at 2.0 GHz with a power consumption of 15 watts and received the Best Extreme Processor accolade in 2003. The development cycle for this chip spanned 16 months and involved a team of 45 engineers.
In partnership with Samsung, Intrinsity developed a 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 core announced in 2009, following an earlier release of a high-speed Cortex-R4 design two years earlier.
Customers
- ATI – employed Intrinsity’s innovations to decrease transistor counts within GPUs.
- AMCC – utilized Power ISA-based designs achieving clock speeds up to 3 GHz.
- LSI Corporation (previously Agere Systems) – incorporated Intrinsity’s technologies for creating high-performance, energy-efficient macrocells.
- Samsung – collaborated on developing high-frequency, low-power processor cores.