Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Flex Logix, developer of embedded FPGA technology, raises $5m

Flex Logix Technologies, headquartered in Mountain View, California, a supplier of embedded FPGA IP and software:

a.         Founded in March 2014 to develop solutions for reconfigurable RTL in chip and system designs employing embedded FPGA IP cores and software.

b.         Offering the EFLX technology platform designed to significantly reduce design and manufacturing risks, accelerate technology development and provide greater flexibility for customers' hardware.

c.         Which in October 2015 announced it had raised $7.4 million in a financing round was led by dedicated hardware fund Eclipse Ventures (formerly the Formation 8 hardware fund), with participation from founding investors Lux Capital and the Tate Family Trust.

Announced it has secured $5 million in Series B equity financing in a round led by existing investors Lux Capital and Eclipse Ventures, with participation from the Tate Family Trust.

Flex Logix stated that new funding will be used to expand its sales, applications and engineering teams to meet the growing customer demand for its embedded FPGA platform in applications including networking, government, data centres and deep learning.

Targeting chips in multiple markets, the Flex Logix EFLX platform can be used with networking chips with reconfigurable protocols, data centre chips with reconfigurable accelerators, deep learning chips with real-time upgradeable algorithms, base stations chips with customisable features and MCU/IoT chips with flexible I/O and accelerators. The company noted that EFLX is currently available for popular process nodes and is being ported to further process nodes based on customer demand.

The Flex Logix technology offers high-density blocks of programmable RTL in any size together with the key features customers require. The solution allows designers to customise a single chip to address multiple markets and/or upgrade the chip while in the system to meet to changing standards such as networking protocols. It also allows customers to update chips with new deep learning algorithms and implement their own versions of protocols in data centres.

Regarding the new funding, Peter Hebert, managing partner at Lux Capital, said, "I believe that Flex Logix's embedded FPGA has the potential to be as pervasive as ARM's embedded processors… the company's software and silicon are proven and in use at multiple customers, paving the way to become one of the most widely-used chip building blocks across many markets and for a range of applications".

While Pierre Lamond, partner at Eclipse Ventures, commented, "The Flex Logix platform is the… most scalable and flexible embedded FPGA solution on the market, delivering competitive advantages in time to market, engineering efficiency, minimum metal layers and high density… the patented technology combined with an experienced management team led by Geoff Tate, founding CEO of Rambus, position the company for rapid growth".