MathStar, a start-up based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, secured $6 million in new funding for its Field Programmable Object Array (FPOAs), which are positioned as an alternative to 130nm ASICs and conventional FPGAs. The new funding will be used to manufacture and market a family of FPOA chips that are both faster (2 — 20 times faster) and less costly than conventional FPGAs from Xilinx and Altera. As part of the terms of the offering, investors in the $6 million funding round may invest an additional $3.75 million as MathStar achieves certain near-term milestones. MathStar shareholders include institutional, venture and individual investors. MathStar has raised $40 million to date.
http://www.mathstar.com
- In June 2003, MathStar revealed architectural details of its new Field-Programmable Object Arrays (FPOAs). The new devices would give design teams flexible field re-programmability with deterministic 1GHz clock performance and attractive unit cost. To simplify the design process, cycle-accurate C-based functional models are directly mapped into the FPOA architecture. MathStar will target applications domains using customized mixes of object types, on-chip memory resources, and high-performance I/O. Initial target applications will include extreme DSP and wire speed packet processing and aggregation applications in 10 Gbps networking and storage equipment markets.
