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TITLE: VENTURES FOR RECONFIGURABLE DSP
Two new ventures have been launched to provide reconfigurable
digital signal processing hardware and software products. "The
advent of reconfigurable IP cores tuned for computation provides
an important new platform for deploying embedded DSP in SoC
(system on chip) devices," said Will Strauss, Forward Concepts.
Elixent is a Bristol, UK start-up backed by venture capitalist 3i
Group and industrial investors Actel Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co.
Elixent's patented D-Fabrix embeddable array can be reconfigured
to perform different functions -- e.g. a mobile phone could also
support MP3 playback without additional manufacturing cost. Pre-
viously, system designers considering custom chips have had to
choose between FPGAs with high unit price and ASICs with a sub-
stantial initial design cost and fixed function design. Elixent's
embedded reconfigurable arithmetic logic unit array combines the
low unit cost characteristic of ASICs with the programmability of
FPGAs. Elixent has teamed with Celoxica and also with AccelChip
to provide programming using C and MATLAB.
SiliconMobius is a fabless semiconductor start-up based on the
PipeRrench reconfigurable DSP core developed at Carnegie Mellon
University under DARPA sponsorship. The company is developing a
streaming data processor and embedded cores to combine the flex-
ibility, programmability, and scalability of a microprocessor-
based solution with the increased performance of a hardware point
solution. The company is initially focusing on: image processing,
cryptography, network security (intrusion detection), packet
processing, and digital signal processing.
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FILENUMBER: 1077
BEGIN_KEYWORDS
VENTURES FOR RECONFIGURABLE DSP
END_KEYWORDS
DATE: August 2002
TITLE: VENTURES FOR RECONFIGURABLE DSP
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