ST. LOUIS, August 26, 2011 - St. Louis-based Blendics, Inc., a provider of design tools, design services and semiconductor IP for advanced system-on-chip (SoC) networking, announced the close of a first round of funding from National Innovation Fund. National Innovation Fund is an Omaha-based private equity firm. Blendics will use the capital to advance its Asynchronous Network on Chip (ANoC) product portfolio and to expand its market presence in the $5 billion electronic design automation (EDA) industry. Blendics is a graduate of ITEN's Mock Angel Program.
As semiconductors decrease in power consumption while growing in transistor density, design and verification complexity has jumped dramatically. This is due in large part to the challenge of ensuring stability at high speeds and low voltages--a need not addressed by current EDA tools. Blendics' tools and silicon IP allow integrated circuit designers to develop more reliable and lower power products more quickly, while preserving their ability to use existing tools and workflows.
"An entire generation of products will be held back if FPGA and ASIC designers aren't equipped with the right technology," said Blendics president Jerry Cox. "We are excited to have the support of National Innovation."
Blendics was founded to commercialize the results of research carried out at Washington University and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where founders Jerry Cox, George Engel, Tom Chaney and David Zar have been faculty members or research staff members. Proof-of- concept studies and product development were supported by grant funding through the National Science Foundation from 2008 through 2011. Together the founders have over 120 years of experience in high-performance computer system design, combining their expertise in asynchronous circuits (Cox), analog integrated circuits (Engel), IC standard cells and FPGA ICs (Zar) and metastability (Chaney).
Early commercialization partners include Xilinx, the leader in the digital programmable logic device (PLD) market, and Exegy, whose industry-leading Ticker Plant is complemented by a hardware-accelerated trading platform based on the Blendics ANoC solution.
"Success in high-frequency trading demands the fastest possible access to market data paired with the ability to quickly apply proprietary algorithms," said Ron Indeck, CTO and founder of Exegy. "By implementing the Blendics solution within the trading platform, customers can quickly deploy proprietary trading algorithms directly in hardware. We've observed 96% latency reductions when running trading simulations in hardware as opposed to software, so we think this is a very big deal."
Additional information about Exegy's application of Blendics technology may be found here: www.blendics.com/go/exegy.
Blendics is the second enterprise for Cox, who was a founder of Growth Networks, a chip-set company sold to Cisco in 2000 for $350 million. The Growth Networks chip-set became the basis for Cisco's CRS-1, their top-of-the-line router.
About Blendics
Founded in 2007, St. Louis-based Blendics provides design tools, design services and semiconductor IP for the creation of advanced system-on-chip (SoC) integrated circuits. By helping FPGA and ASIC designers overcome challenges of designing for high speeds and low voltages, Blendics is at the forefront of enabling a new generation ambitious products for the consumer electronics, computer, automotive and manufacturing and financial services industires.
For more information about Blendics, please visit www.blendics.com
