Editing Meiko Scientific (section)

==Meiko SPARC FPU==
Meiko had hired Fred (Mark) Homewood and Moray McLaren both of whom had been instrumental in the design of the [[Transputer#T8: floating point|T800]]. Together, they designed and developed an improved, higher performance [[Floating-point unit|FPU]] core, owned by Meiko. This was initially targeted at the [[Intel]] [[80387]] instruction set. An ongoing legal battle between Intel, [[AMD]] and others over the 80387 made it clear this project was a commercial non-starter. A chance discussion between McLaren and [[Andy Bechtolsheim]] while visiting [[Sun Microsystems]] to discuss licensing [[Solaris (operating system)|Solaris]] caused Meiko to re-target the design for [[SPARC]]. Meiko was able to turn around the core [[Floating-point unit|FPU]] design in a short time and [[LSI Corporation|LSI Logic]] fabbed a device for the [[SPARCstation 1]].

A major difference over the T800 FPU was that it fully implemented the [[IEEE floating point|IEEE 754 standard]] for computer arithmetic. This including all rounding modes, denormalised numbers and square root in hardware without taking any [[Exception handling|hardware exceptions]] to complete computation.

A [[SPARCstation 2]] design was also developed together with a combined part targeting the SPARCstation 2 ASIC pinout. LSI fabbed and manufactured the separate FPU L64814, as part of their SparKIT chipset.<ref>[http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc03/2_Mon/HC3.S4/HC3.4.2.pdf SparKIT] HOTCHIPS 03, Stanford; August 1991</ref>

The Meiko design was eventually fully licensed to Sun which went on to use it in the [[MicroSPARC]] family of ASICs for several generations<ref>Sun Taps LSI For Low Cost SPARC design and fab; ''Computer Business Review''; 12 March 1997;</ref> in return for a one-off payment and full Solaris source license.