SCIENCE

Adapteva announced that it has achieved profitability. Backed by BittWare for $1.5 million in November 2009, the four-person company has delivered three generations of silicon in less than two years. An extremely lean development process and laser-focused market vision changed the model for designing and producing a semiconductor chip that can enable everything from smarter mobile devices to HPC datacenters with thousands of cores running on a single platform.

Announced in May 2011, Adapteva's flagship Epiphany microprocessor architecture IP is unprecedented in its ability to scale to thousands of parallel processors on a single chip, connected through a high-bandwidth on-chip network, with each processor capable of executing separate and independent programs. Adapteva has developed a silicon reference platform in 65nm based on the Epiphany architecture, featuring 16 general purpose microprocessor cores running at 1GHz, consuming less than 2 Watt of max power.

"When we began developing our IP in 2008, every expert we spoke to said that it wouldn't be possible to create a semiconductor company that could design, develop and market an advanced microprocessor chip for less than $75 Million dollars," said Andreas Olofsson, CEO and founder of Adapteva. "Not only were we able to produce three generations of silicon for less than $2 Million, we have now achieved a break-even point for our business. Since announcing Epiphany in May, we've seen huge interest in growing the parallel programming model and using our chip to power this process."