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Aspex expands team in growth spurt
by Richard Wilson
Thursday 17 November 2005

Aspex Semiconductor is expanding its High Wycombe-based development team as it sees design-ins for its parallel processing semiconductor architecture growing.

According to Jeremy Hendy, v-p of marketing at Aspex, the firm has 25 customers designing its Line­dancer parallel processor into products which include high-end printers and ultrasound medical imaging systems. "Three customers are already in production," Hendy told Electronics Weekly.

The company is in the middle of a fresh funding round which Hendy said should be completed by the end of the year. Part of the money raised will be used to increase the firm's development and applications engineering teams in the UK.

The research will include the next generation (8th) of Aspex's ASProCore processor fabric which will be fabbed on a 90nm process by the firm's foundry partner, the Crolles Alliance next year.
            
According to Hendy, another important strategy for the firm is the development of versions of its parallel processor architecture for specific applications, the first of which is the Line­dancer-HD with increased memory bandwidth and I/O capabilities for video processing applications.

As part of its fresh focus on applications rather than generic processor designs, the firm introduced earlier this year a PCI-X card containing four of its Linedancer chips for video editing, high definition TV and machine vision applications. Called Accelera 3000, the PCI-X board is aimed at PCs running Linux or Windows, with Macs to follow. Each board contains 16,384 processing elements.

According to Hendy, an important selling point of the firm's approach to parallel processing is its inherent simplicity and scalability. It is based on basic single instruction multiple data (SIMD) processor element which can be paralleled to more than 4,000 processors on one Linedancer chip.

"Programming is simple because designers are effectively writing code for a simple 32-bit CPU," said Hendy.

www.aspex-semi.com