Edinburgh-based fabless chip start-up Spiral Gateway is to focus on reconfigurable image processors on mobile phones.
“We intend to see first silicon somewhere in late 2008 or early 2009, it depends a bit on funding,” CEO Graham Townsend told
EW. “We anticipate sales starting in 2010.”
Townsend has recently joined Spiral following years as CTO at STMicroelectronics’ Edinburgh image sensor development centre, known as Vision before the ST buy-out and now a large supplier of sensors to phone firms including Nokia.
Under him Spiral will start to ramp up development in the next six months. “We are looking for in the order of £5m to £6m in the first quarter of next year and will use that to prove the technological capability,” he said. “By the end of 2008 we anticipate being about 35 staff including 25 to 28 engineers, and by the end of 2009 more like 60 staff.”
Spiral’s technology came out of the University of Edinburgh and allows fast execution of C-based DSP code. “It translates C into a net list. The hardware is an array of ‘instruction cells’ that match up with C primitives,” explained Townsend.
Originally set up as an intellectual property (IP) vendor, Spiral is now concentrating on the image signal processor (ISP) chips that sit between image sensor and the rest of the phone, processing pixel data and removing image defects. Its competition is hard-wired processors, which Townsend admits will continue to dominate phone sensors of 2Mpixel and below.
The calculation is demanding. “One way or another there will be high-definition 1080p video on a camera phone at 30 frame/s in 2010,” predicted Townsend, who is aiming at the 3-8Mpixel camera phone market.
Spiral’s unique selling point is that by replacing hard-wired processors, OEMs get the chance to add value to image processing algorithms - in their favoured language C - and add it on the production line rather than having to commit a whole chip spin in advance.