Startup GTronix offers smart analog, aims at portable consumer electronics market

By Debra Bulkeley, Executive Editor -- Electronic Business, 9/18/2006

A fabless semiconductor company launched today aims to add local intelligence to sensory interfaces.

GTronix Inc., headquartered in Fremont, CA with offices in Atlanta, has developed a proprietary analog signal processing technology called APT Technology that was also unveiled today. (APT is not an acronym.) 

The privately held company, founded in 2003 by Georgia Institute of Technology Ph.D. students Jeff Dugger, Matt Kucic and Paul Smith, has received more than $13 million in funding. The funding includes an initial seed round from a Georgia Tech incubator and two rounds of venture funding from Menlo Ventures.

Hubert Engelbrechten, GTronix CEO, explains that GTronix’ technology goes back to the days of analog computing when analog programming was “agony.”
 
“What we’ve done over the last couple of years is taken the agony out of analog and made analog a lot more user friendly by adding programmability,” he explains.

 “The technology was refined in the early 90s in Cal Tech under Carver Mead, and then Paul Hasler, one of our founders who was a Ph.D. student under Carver, took the technology and developed it further to where we are today--we can implement relatively complex programmable analog with analog I/Os relatively easily,” says Engelbrechten, who has held executive positions with Fairchild Semiconductor, Raytheon Semiconductor and National Semiconductor during his 25 years in the analog semiconductor industry.

“We’re doing the programmability in a unique way,” adds Tom Darbonne, vice president of marketing. “We are going to make some tiny chips but most are parallel in implementation, which gives us speed.”

The company, which employs 22 (14 are development engineers), is initially targeting the portable consumer electronics market, Darbonne explains. As devices, particularly those in the consumer market, get smaller, a stronger focus on sensors and sensor processing is inevitable. This also means that software will become more complex, since customers are demanding features that increase signal processing of sensor data.

And as features increase, less power is available. “Battery capacity is not keeping pace with the demand for power,” Darbonne says.

GTronix’ approach, Darbonne says, is to offload or replace DSP using Analog Signal Processing (ASP).  “We are going to try to take the signal processing off of the DSP using analog signal processing. We integrate the entire sensory processing chain into a low-cost IC.”

Learn more about Gtronix technology. Click here to hear an audiocast with Gtronix CEO Hubert Engelbrechten.