Celoxica Holdings has agreed the $3m sale of its electronic system level (ESL) business to US firm Catalytic.

The deal includes the Oxfordshire-based firm’s C-to-field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, products and services.

The US firm takes on 18 staff from Celoxica at offices in the UK, US and Japan.

The products associated with this are the DK Design Suite, PixelStreams and Agility Compiler software products and the RC Series of FPGA development and prototyping boards.

The sale of the ESL business represents a significant change of focus for Celoxica which effectively becomes a designer of accelerated computer board technology. For some time it has been focusing on the accelerated computing side because of the market opportunity and the firm has forged closer ties with the main microprocessor companies such as AMD.

“The sale of the ESL business represents a significant step-change for Celoxica, enabling the Group to focus fully on the growing opportunities within the accelerated computing market,” said Jack Fryer, company chairman.

Celoxica will continue as a reseller of the DK Design Suite to the finance, life sciences and oil and gas exploration industries.

Behind the acquisition is recognition of the growing importance of high level C-based design in consumer as well as defence, security and medical systems. "With this move, we can synthesize the top two languages for high-level algorithm development — C and MATLAB — and deliver both software and hardware implementations," said Dave Burow, Catalytic’s CEO.

Jeff Jussel, Celoxica’s v-p joins Catalytic as v-p of worldwide sales for the acquired products. "This is the right move. It enables Celoxica to focus on growing its high-performance computing business and transfers the development tools to Catalytic to deliver complete algorithm to implementation solutions," said Jussel.
 
Catalytic is a design software firm which specials in compilers and syntheses for converting MATLAB code into C-code.