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Axis Chip Development History
In 1984, Axis was founded with a goal to become the leader
in the IBM mainframe and midrange printer protocol converter
market. As available solutions for IBM connectivity were
expensive, unreliable and bulky, Axis decided to build up a
core competence in ASIC design. This had the added benefit of
leapfrogging competition; lowering system cost for volume
products; providing easier use of off-the-shelf technology;
and supporting application-specific tasks needing high network
I/O bandwidth - communications speed rather than computational
power. The specific technology advancements are as follows:
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- 1986
- TGA1 Communications Transceiver AS/400 communications
transceiver
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- 1987
- CGA1 RISC Mainframe and AS/400 communications controller
Increased performance and cost-efficiency with over 200%
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- 1990
- CGA3 8/16-bit 6809 RISC and CGA1 single chip solution
First IBM connectivity system-on-a-chip solution
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- 1993
- ETRAX (Ethernet, Token Ring, AXis) 32-bit RISC,
Ethernet, Token Ring and I/O - First networking
system-on-a-chip solution
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- 1993-96
- ETRAX 2, 3, 4 - Enhancements to ETRAX 1; Improved
performance, added SCSI
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- 1998
- ETRAX 100 - Added 100 MBit Ethernet. Performance
increased to 100 MIPS. Added ATA & Wide SCSI
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- 2000
- ETRAX 100LX - Added MMU, USB, Synchronous serial ports,
SDRAM support
- 2003
- ETRAX 100LX MCM 2+8 - Package with ETRAX 100LX, Ethernet PHY, 2 MB Flash
and 8 MB SDRAM, later followed by a version with 4 MB Flash
and 16 MB SDRAM
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- 2005
- ETRAX FS - Crypto accelerator in hardware, I/O processor,
dual Fast Ethernet controllers 200 MIPS CPU.
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