Failed processor firm finds customer for assetsRichard BallSuggestions that Altera has bought the intellectual property of failed processor firm Siroyan have not been denied by the FPGA firm.
Former CEO of Siroyan, Ken Will, told Electronics Weekly: "All the company's assets have been sold to a single buyer." However, Will is bound by non-disclosure agreement not to reveal the name of the buyer.
Altera would not comment on the suggested deal. If true it would mean Altera owns the rights to two of the most powerful DSP architectures, the other being BOPS, which it acquired earlier this year.
Siroyan closed its doors earlier this year after running out of cash. "We made the vast majority of our staff redundant in January," said Will. By May, only Will himself remained at the firm.
Since its launch as an IP developer in 1999 the firm raised $20m in funding, some $7m from nCoTec. Other backers included Argyle Investments and Tudor Investments.
Siroyan's OneDSP has a clustered very long instruction word (VLIW) architecture, with a master execution unit and multiple slave units. It is claimed to be capable of both Risc and DSP type operations. A 32-way design was said to be capable of 25 billion MAC operations a second.
However, it took until late 2002 for the firm to gain its first big design win with a large consumer electronics firm.
The collapse in the chip industry ended Siroyan's plans for a stock market float. By June 2002 the firm had opened a US office and planned to employ 200 people by 2004.