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.