BINACHIP Automates Embedded Application Development -- Slashes Design Time From Months To Days.SAN JOSE San Jose, city, United States San Jose (sănəzā`, săn hōzā`), city (1990 pop. 782,248), seat of Santa Clara co., W central Calif.; founded 1777, inc. 1850. , Calif. -- BINACHIP, a new embedded applications automation company, has begun operations and will ship its first product late Q2, 2006. BINACHIP's technology automates the process of creating high-performance embedded applications, slashing design times from months to days. Dr. Susheel Chandra has been named president and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of the new company with offices in San Jose and Glenview, Ill. "The explosive growth of platform-based design starts are putting tremendous pressure on the embedded application designer," Dr. Chandra said, "These chips are equal parts hardware and software, so there are myriad tradeoffs associated with what to put in hardware and what to put in software. We are in business to automate and optimize these decisions so designers can meet their price/performance and time-to-market goals." How It Works Computationally intensive real-time applications such as voice-over-IP, video-over-IP, 3G and 4G wireless communications, MP3 players, JPEG JPEG in full Joint Photographic Experts Group Standard computer file format for storing graphic images in a compressed form for general use. JPEG images are compressed using a mathematical algorithm. and MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group) An ISO/ITU standard for compressing digital video. Pronounced "em-peg," it is the universal standard for digital terrestrial, cable and satellite TV, DVDs and digital video recorders (DVRs). encoding/decoding, require an integrated hardware/software platform for optimal performance. Parts of the application run in software on a general purpose processor and other portions need to run on application-specific hardware to meet performance requirements. BINACHIP enables embedded systems developers to make hardware/software tradeoffs for optimal performance. It also allows seamless migration of software from older general-purpose embedded processors onto hardware and mixed hardware/software platforms of the future. BINACHIP automates the translation of software assembly and binaries onto mixed hardware/software platforms, thereby reducing design times from months to days. Embedded applications are typically developed in a high level such as C/C C/C Center to Center C/C Combustion Chamber C/C Command/Control C/C Crew Chief C/C cabin cruiser (US DoD) C/C chief complaint (medical) C/C Channel-to-Channel C/C Communication and Collaboration ++ or MATLAB (MATrix LABoratory) A programming language for technical computing from The MathWorks, Natick, MA (www.mathworks.com). Used for a wide variety of scientific and engineering calculations, especially for automatic control and signal processing, MATLAB runs on Windows, Mac and and then compiled into a general purpose processor binary, or they may be available only in binary form from previous legacy designs. BINACHIP takes this binary, performs automated hardware/software co-design at the assembly language level, and generates software code for the target processor, and RTL (Register Transfer Level) A high-level hardware description language (HDL) for defining digital circuits. The circuits are described as a collection of registers, Boolean equations, control logic such as "if-then-else" statements as well as complex event sequences; VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language) A hardware description language (HDL) used to design electronic systems at the component, board and system level. VHDL allows models to be developed at a very high level of abstraction. and Verilog code that can be implemented on an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) A type of gate array that is programmed in the field rather than in a semiconductor fab. Containing up to hundreds of thousands of gates, there are a variety of FPGA architectures on the market. . "BINACHIP is the only company that starts with binaries rather than a high-level language and can do fine-grain mapping," according to industry analyst Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts. "I look for them to do a lot to enable high-performance embedded applications in the DSP (1) (Digital Signal Processor) A special-purpose CPU used for digital signal processing applications (see definition #2 below). It provides ultra-fast instruction sequences, such as shift and add, and multiply and add, which are commonly used in math-intensive space." First Product Targets FPGA Implementation The company's first product, BINACHIP-FPGA, will ship late Q2, 2006. Using standard profiling tools, the user determines if a portion of the binary code will benefit from a hardware implementation. If so, it is automatically compiled into hardware using BINACHIP-FPGA, and the appropriate hardware/software interfaces are generated, while the remaining code is translated into binary for the target processor. Depending on the application, the resulting implementation can provide a 10X to 50X speedup over a pure software implementation. "There is definitely a market for BINACHIP's technology in the high-performance embedded applications space," said high-tech consultant Clive 'Max' Maxfield, president of TechBites. "I think they're in the right place at the right time." Dr. Susheel Chandra Named CEO Dr. Chandra joined BINACHIP in January 2006 as president and CEO, after three years with Sequence Design as senior vice president of R&D and product marketing. Before that he was general manager of Mentor Graphics' Intellectual Property Division, and founded Mentor's India operations in 1997. Prior to joining Mentor he held technical and management positions with Checklogic and Sony Corporation. Dr. Chandra holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Early years: 1867-1880 The Morrill Act of 1862 granted each state in the United States a portion of land on which to establish a major public state university, one which could teach agriculture, mechanic arts, and military training, "without excluding other scientific , has authored 25 conference and journal papers, and holds three patents. "I am delighted to have a person of Susheel's caliber and deep domain experience in the industry join BINACHIP at this point to take the company to the next level," said Dr. Prith Banerjee, founder of BINACHIP and Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago This article is about the University of Illinois at Chicago. For other uses, see University of Illinois at Chicago (disambiguation). UIC participates in NCAA Division I Horizon League competition as the UIC Flames in several sports, most notably Basketball. . About BINACHIP BINACHIP develops and markets software products and services that enable embedded systems developers to design and implement high-performance applications within their price/performance and time-to-market constraints. It also enables seamless migration of software from older-generation, general-purpose, embedded processors into newer hardware and mixed hardware/software platforms of the future. BINACHIP's core technology evolved from work done at Northwestern University. BINACHIP is privately held with offices in San Jose, Calif., and Glenview, Ill. For more information: www.binachip.com. All trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners. |
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