UCD campus company Neosera Systems has signed a contract to provide its technology to a major research project involving Philips Semiconductor and the Technical University of Graz in Austria that will revolutionise future in-car and smart card technology.
The deal is the first commercial contract to be signed by Neosera and will see its APPLES (associative parallel processor for logic event-driven simulation) technology used to accelerate the simulation of circuits in automobile applications and smart card technology.
The project will also address new issues and problems being encountered in contemporary digital designs such as test bench acceleration and accurate power calculation, resulting in reduced chip development time and enabling manufacturers to deliver products faster to market.
Neosera Systems is one of the companies based at the €10m NovaUCD incubator on UCD’s campus. The NovaUCD centre has 40 incubation units and provides innovators and entrepreneurs with the necessary support and knowledge to take their ideas from proof of concept to commercial success. The centre is managed by the University Industry Programme, which has established an established track record in spinning-off campus companies. These include Changing Worlds, Massana, NTera and WBT Systems. Spin-offs from UCD have collectively raised US$90m in funding to date.
Neosera was founded in June 2001 by Dr Damian Dalton of UCD’s Department of Computer Science with Paul Birkett and Ann O’Hanlon and has raised €950,000 in investment to date. The company has a research team of 10 in NovaUCD with a further research team based at the Technical University of Graz as well as a commercial office on the west coast of the US.
Commenting on the contract win, Dr Dalton said: “This commercial contract inaugurates the release of the APPLES platform into the European digital design market. The North American market will also be a significant customer base for the system in the medium to long term.
“Our APPLES platform currently offers a 10-fold increase in processing speed compared to a Pentium processor and the feedback to date augurs well for a bright future for the company,” Dalton said.
By John Kennedy
