Inmos

Inmos Ltd.. was a British semiconductor company based in Bristol. The company was founded in November 1978 by Iann Baron. The company developed the transputer.

History

The company was founded by Iann Brannon, a British computer consultant, and the two Americans Richard Petritz and Paul Schroeder. Petritz and Schroeder both had many years of experience in the semiconductor industry. The National Enterprise Board of the British government provided for 50 million pounds available. In addition to the parent company in England, the U.S. Inmos Corporation subsidiary was founded in Colorado. Hableiterfabriken were built in Colorado Springs, Colorado and in Newport, Wales. Under the privatization policy of Margaret Thatcher, the National Enterprise Board was incorporated in the British Technology Group and had to sell his shares to Inmos. First of all the deals from AT & T as well as by a Dutch consortium of companies were rejected. In July 1984, the company Thorn EMI provided a total of 124.1 million pounds for the 76 % large portion of the state. This offer was later increased to 192 million pounds and adopted in August 1984. Overall, Inmos had previously received £ 211 million from the British government, but still could not write black.

In April 1989, Inmos was sold to SGS - Thomson. Around the same time the company began on T9000 - an improved version of the transputer - to work. Due to various technical problems and delays, the project was abandoned, however, and thus marked the end of the transputer as a parallel processor platform. Modifications of the processor as the ST20 but were later integrated into chipsets for embedded systems such as set- top boxes.

In December 1994, Inmos was fully incorporated into the name STMicroelectronics and Inmos since no longer used.

Products

Inmos manufactured first SRAMs. Later DRAM and EEPROM devices were added. The long-term goal of Iann Baron, however, was to develop a new microprocessor architecture, which should be designed for parallelization of computing processes. With this task, the employee David May and Robert Milne have been designated. In 1985, the newly developed type of processor in the form of the T212 and T414 processors in production. Especially for the new processor type, the Occam programming language was created.

The transputer recorded some successes as a basis for various supercomputers of Meiko, Floating Point Systems, Parsytec and Parsys. Meiko was founded by former Inmos - employee company. Since the processor had a self-contained design, it was also used in some embedded systems. The unconventional nature of the processor and its programming language, however, greatly detracted from its attractiveness. In the late 1980s, the processor could not keep up with the performance of competing products also.

In addition to the transputer processors DSPs presented Inmos RAMDACs and forth. The digital signal processor Inmos G171 was used by IBM in the construction of VGA graphics card for PS/2-Systeme.