MathStar, the high performance programmable logic start-up, has taken on two field application engineers in the UK and engaged the repping company Ultimate Marketing to get its products into the UK market.
MathStar started shipping its first production-ready chip in the US in November to 17 customers, and the first products using the chip will be on the market in Q1 or early Q2.
“Some of them may require high volume,” MathStar’s co-founder and CEO, Douglas Pihl, told EW.
MathStar’s first chip is a 1GHz device containing 400 processing elements for processing multiple streams of high definition video and multiple protocols. With a catalogue price of $285 per chip, first production will generate solid revenues for the firm which has received $30m in seed capital, another $26m at its IPO in 2005 and may need to raise another $20m to $25m.
The first design-wins are in machine vision and video equipment.
When the first 0.13µm chip is migrated to 90nm in October, the company will also be targeting
medical imaging and test and measurement applications.
“The test and measurement people need a chip able to do 32-bit arithmetic. The 90nm chip can do that very effectively,” said Pihl.