19-Year-Old's Supercomputer Chip Startup Gets DARPA Contract

Back in March, we introduced a chip upstart taking aim at the efficiency of future exascale systems called Rex Computing. The young company is now armed with $1.25 million to hire another few engineers to move the Neo chips from concept to production—and also has a sizable DARPA contract to match the early interest it found with select national labs in the U.S..

For the background on the architecture and to a lesser extent, the company’s founder (who is not yet twenty), check the initial overview of Rex Computing. Since the time of that piece, founder Thomas Sohmers and his small team have been in the process of locking down the architecture to round out the final verified RTL by the end of this year. Rex Computing will be sampling its first chips in the middle of next year and will move to full production silicon in mid-2017 using TSMC’s 28 nanometer process.

In addition to the young company’s first round of financing, Rex Computing has also secured close to $100,000 in DARPA funds. The full description can be found midway down this DARPA document under “Programming New Computers,” and has, according to Sohmers, been instrumental as they start down the verification and early tape out process for the Neo chips. The funding is designed to target the automatic scratch pad memory tools, which, according to Sohmers is the “difficult part and where this approach might succeed where others have failed is the static compilation analysis technology at runtime.”