Bristol-based processor developer ClearSpeed has raised
£11.1m through a share offering on the Alternative Investment
Market of the London Stock Exchange.
The fabless firm said it would use the money to continue
development of its multi-threaded parallel processor and bolster
its balance sheet.
Tom Beese, CEO at ClearSpeed, said that in order to win
contracts with tier one firms it must be financially stable, hence
the IPO.
“The good news is we’ve partnered with people like
Sun, but they need to see a more financially secure company,”
Beese said.
Part of the money raised will go towards producing the first
commercial device, expected in November, a refinement of the CS301
prototype.
“The commercial chip contains the same fundamental
architecture and is manufactured on the same IBM 0.13µm
process,” said Beese.
However, it will have some changes, he said: “Some reviews
of the CS301 observed that for all its phenomenal performance, in
some applications you couldn’t get the data on and off the
chip quick enough.”
Thus it is likely the commercial device will have increased data
bandwidth above the CS301’s 1.6Gbyte/s. The CS301 has peak
processing power of 25.6Gflops and draws just 2W, claimed the
firm.
A 64-bit version is also under development, for which the firm
won a £427,800 DTI grant.
These two projects will require additional resources.
“We’re slowly and cautiously building up the
team,” said Beese, “so we do expect to keep recruiting
in the US and UK.”
ClearSpeed started life as PixelFusion in 1997, aiming its
designs at graphics processing. With a name change it moved to
network routing, then scientific computing.