March 10, 2008
Celestica in a tie-up with Microsoft to Develop the BEE3 Platform Prototypes
TMCnet Contributing Editor
Celestica (News - Alert) is a global player in the industry for state-of-art electronics manufacturing services (EMS). The Toronto-based company provides a broad range of integrated services and solutions to OEMs.
The firm has entered into a relationship with Microsoft (News - Alert), to design the BEE3. The BEE3 is short for Berkeley Emulation Engine 3rd version. The ultimate goal of this project is to enable companies, like Microsoft for example, to carry out computer architectural research.
The BEE3 development platform basically allows emulation of a multi-core processing environment. This environment is slated to have at least a minimum of a 1000 cores. The way this will work is that there will be four interconnected field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) linked to a variety of high-speed interfaces.
A field-programmable gate array is a semiconductor device containing programmable logic components called "logic blocks", and programmable interconnects. Logic blocks can be programmed to perform the function of basic logic gates such as AND, and XOR, or more complex combinational functions such as decoders or simple mathematical functions. In most FPGAs, the logic blocks also include memory elements, which may be simple flip-flops or more complete blocks of memory.
A hierarchy of programmable interconnects allows logic blocks to be interconnected as needed by the system designer, somewhat like a one-chip programmable breadboard. Logic blocks and interconnects can be programmed by the customer or designer, after the FPGA is manufactured, to implement any logical function—hence the name "field-programmable."
The emulation should be able to upscale without any glitches from a single board to as many as 256 boards. The BEE3 platform enables large-scale architectural research in areas such as ECAD tool acceleration, scientific computing and computer architecture emulation.
“We are dedicated to developing new and innovative technologies that will shape the future computing experience,” said Chuck Thacker, Microsoft Technical Fellow. “The production of the BEE3 platform required a deep understanding of complex high speed design and production. Based on our experience with Celestica, we knew their engineering talent, experience and CoreSimTM design tools would ensure successful development of this innovative platform.”
Celestica has tied-up with Microsoft to design the prototypes. In more detail, the firm has provided the hardware specifications, schematic capture, layout, signal integrity analysis, static analysis, schematic modeling, and test design for manufacturing.
Calvin Azuri is a TMCnet Contributing Journalist
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