RMI Corporation

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RMI Corporation, also known as RMI, formerly known as Raza Microelectronics, Inc., is a privately held Fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Cupertino, California, which specializes in designing CPU chips for specialized, primarily networking applications.

1 History
2 Product lines
3 References
4 External links

[edit] History

RMI was founded in 2002 by Atiq Raza, who had previously founded the NexGen CPU company, which was acquired by AMD in 1996. Atiq Raza was AMD's President and Chief Operating Officer in the late 1990s after the NexGen acquisition. Behrooz Abdi became president and CEO of RMI in November 2007. RMI changed its name from Raza Microelectronics, Inc. to RMI Corporation in December 2007. RMI is not affiliated with Foundries Holdings, LLC, formerly known as Raza Foundries, Inc.

RMI internally developed three main product lines (XLR/XLS and Orion) and purchased a fourth from AMD in 2006 (Alchemy).

[edit] Product lines

RMI produces four key product lines:

XLR - A multicore, multithreading CPU used for network processing. XLR chips have 2 to 8 MIPS CPU cores, which have each been extended to support 4 hardware threads.^[1] XLR processors include HyperTransport, PCI-X, Gigabit Ethernet, and optionally 10 gigabit Ethernet interconnects built in to the CPU. ^[2]
XLS - A smaller, lower cost multicore multithreading MIPS based CPU used for network processing. The XLS family has options with 1 or 2 CPU cores, each with 4 hardware threads; 2 to 8 gigabit ethernet interfaces; USB interfaces; and 1 or 2 PCI-E interfaces. ^[2]
Alchemy - Originally developed by Alchemy Semiconductor, which was then purchased by Advanced Micro Devices, this CPU product line was purchased by RMI in 2006.^[3] The Alchemy processor is a low power usage MIPS architecture CPU with integrated graphics and signal processing, designed for media players and portable video devices.^[4]
Orion - a network interface chip used to translate Gigabit Ethernet data traffic to SONET OC-48 network links and back again, to interface local area networks with wide area network circuits.^[5]

RMI processors are used in a number of router, firewall, and switch products sold by other networking equipment vendors, and consumer electronics manufacturers.