Embedded Systems Design Europe - May 2008 - (Page 8)

news Enea buys French and Romanian developers RTOS specialist Enea AB continues to expand with the acquisition of Romanian embedded systems developer IP Devel srl for €3.2 million and Netbricks SAS, a French developer and supplier of networking protocol stacks, for €3 million with an additional payment after three years based on its ﬁnancial performance. Enea (Stockholm, Sweden) said the Netbricks acquisition is aimed at strengthening and expanding its product portfolio for next-generation networking applications. Both company have complementary customers among international network equipment providers. Created in 1989, Netbricks provides software products that are designed speciﬁcally for OEM’s, including communication protocols for both traditional networks and next-generation networks. Netbricks claimed its family of software products provides an implementation of industry standards and features a modular and portable architecture that facilitates compiler, OS and CPU independence. For the year 2007, Netbricks reported revenues of €2.5 million and employs 17 people and has ofﬁces in France and in Israel. “Netbricks’ protocol stacks will be integrated with Enea’s software portfolio,” said Didier Raffenoux, Netbricks’ president. “Netbricks’ telecom customers will increase Enea’s sales in Europe and Israel, where we are particularly strong. We also expect this acquisition to increase the interest for Netbricks products in the Nordic and U.S. markets where Enea is strong.” Enea will also have to make additional payments for IP Devel srl after four years based on its ﬁnancial performances and said the acquisition of provides the company “with a base on which to expand its European business” and “secures development capacity for its own products.” Founded in 2000, IP Devel is specialized in embedded systems development and advanced test services. Based in Bucharest, the company employs about 120 people. For the year 2007, IP Devel reported net sales of about €4 million. Johan Wall, Enea’s president and CEO, said “IP Devel is a well-run and proﬁtable company with good growth and great customers. With IP Devel we grow Enea’s professional services offer in Europe. With the acquisition we also secure Enea’s, and our customers’, future development capacity in a low cost environment.” At about the same time last year, Enea acquired, for $1.2 million, fellow Swedish software group QiValue Technologies, which specializes in embedded and enterprise Linux development. Irish start-up raises funds for telecom FPGAs Startup Omiino Ltd. (Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland) has raised a seed funding round of £1.05 million to be used for the development of ﬁeldprogrammable gate arrays (FPGAs) programmed for use in telecommunications network equipment. Omiino develops “FPGA-based” silicon for telecommunications equipment vendors, according to Gary Hamilton, Omiino’s chief executive ofﬁcer. The company names FPGA vendor Xilinx Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) as a partner, suggesting that it is programming up Xilinx FPGAs and selling them on. A quote from the company’s website states “Omiino has responded…by pioneering the process of building solutions on the latest generation of commodity FPGAs,” the company states. Elsewhere the company states: “Over the next few months we will be rolling out a family of high order 8 framers and packet mappers for packet optical networks in the 10G, 20G and 40G and Ethernet segments. These FPGA-based Omiino solutions will compete aggressively with ASIC-based offerings.” The primary backer of Omiino is Crescent Capital, a Belfast, Northern Ireland based venture capital ﬁrm, which has invested £750,000. The rest of the money was provided by the management team, private investors and bank funding under a small loans guarantee scheme. “So-called application-speciﬁc silicon requires vast up-front investment and veriﬁcation costs. For telecommunications network equipment vendors the return on investment is getting longer for such devices,” argued Deirdre Terrins of Crescent Capital, in a statement. In other words Terrins believes that networking companies can no longer afford custom silicon made at the leading edge of manufacturing and will therefore turn to programmable silicon with a lower development cost. “We’re delighted that Crescent Capital has recognized that our team’s experience in telecommunications and silicon design gives us a unique ability to tap into this signiﬁcant market opportunity,” said Hamilton in the same statement. “We apply industry and silicon design understanding to create market deﬁning industry-speciﬁc integrated circuits,” he added before going on to say “With Crescent’s support we will be able to start developing our initial product offerings and development road-map. We’re already in dialogue with several equipment vendors who have shown considerable interest in our product plans.” MAY 2008 | embedded systems design europe | www.embedded.com/europe http://www.embedded.com/europe

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Embedded Systems Design Europe - May 2008

Embedded Systems Design Europe - May 2008 Contents Microsoft Provides Embedded Roadmap Enea Buys Developers Irish Start-Up Raises Funds for Telecom FPGAs Kontron Promotes COM Express Nano Mentor Nucleus Platform Provides UI for Atmel Small Form Factor Boards Head for the SUMIT Proffibus Advances IO-Link Integration Embedded Developers Cautious on Multicore Auto Cooperation Improves Test Altera Launches DO-254 Partner Network Building an ‘Instant-Up’ Real-Time Operating Systems An Architecture for Reusable Embedded Systems Software Free up Bandwidth in PCI Express Evaluating Software in Medical Devices Circuit Sensitivity in Analog Circuits Choosing Flash Memory New Products Advertising Contacts

Embedded Systems Design Europe - May 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.