Press Release

Ambric¡¦s University Research Program Expands to 13 Members Worldwide

Imperial College London, University of Washington, and Lawrence Livermore National Labs Among Leading Organizations Choosing Ambric MPPAs and Software for Advanced Research Projects

Source: Ambric
7/9/2008

Beaverton, Ore. — July 9, 2008 — Ambric® has expanded its University Program to 13 members worldwide. All of the program members are using Ambric’s Massively Parallel Processor Array (MPPA) chips and aDesigner software development tools to tackle leading-edge research projects more effectively than with the traditional architectures and development tools of digital signal processors (DSPs), and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Ambric supports program members’ research in burgeoning, high-performance parallel processing fields such as medical imaging, video, wireless, image recognition, and defense. The 1.2 TeraOPS performance and highly scalable architecture of Ambric MPPA chips uniquely support the requirements of these advanced research initiatives.

“It’s exciting to see the diversity of applications and the performance utilization of our MPPA chips and software products,” said Joe Herbst, vice president of marketing at Ambric. “The patented Ambric architecture and development tools enable researchers to solve problems in a faster and much more efficient way.”

Ambric University Program Members and Their Applications

U.S.A.
„X Boston University
Protein Docking Simulation
„X Brigham Young University
Computer Vision,
Image Processing
„X Lawrence Livermore National Labs
Image Recognition,
Signal Processing
„X Portland State University
Machine Learning
„X University of Southern
California
Medical Ultrasound
„X University of South Carolina
Medical Image Processing
„X Virginia Tech
Software-defined Radio
„X University of Washington
Video Encoding,
Computer Architecture

International
„X Imperial College London, U.K.
Financial Market Simulation
„X Halmstad University, Sweden
LTE software-defined radio
„X University of British Columbia
Computer architecture
„X University of Santiago, Spain
Video encoding
„X University of Toronto
Image processing

“Ambric tools were designed for easier learning and rapid development,” said Mike Butts, Ambric Fellow and University Program administrator. “The researchers and graduate students have quickly adopted the Ambric aDesigner tools and achieved successful results on the MPPA chips with little to no special training or support needed from Ambric.”

Master’s Thesis Highlights Unique Benefits of Ambric Platform

The Master’s thesis of Halmstad University graduate students, Chaudhry Majid Ali and Muhammad Qasim, cited several compelling benefits of using Ambric’s MPPA chips and development software:

“The simple combination of objects written in normal software code, combined in a hierarchy of block-diagram structures, makes high-performance design development much easier and cheaper . . .”

“Most applications are compiled in less than one minute . . . As with software development, the design, debug, edit, and re-run cycles are nearly interactive . . .”

“The object-based modularity of the structural object programming model facilitates the design reuse.”

“. . . in this way, (the) divide-and-conquer technique will be very useful as there is no scheduling, no sharing, and no multi-threading.”

“The inter-processor communication and synchronization is simple. Sending and receiving a word through a channel is so simple, just like reading or writing a processor register. This kind of development is much easier and cheaper and achieves long-term scalability, performance, and power advantages of massive parallelism.”

About Ambric, Inc.
Ambric is the leader in massively parallel processor arrays (MPPAs), each delivering more than one TeraOPS of performance for embedded system designs. Headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, Ambric launched its first product in 2007 with 336 RISC and DSP processors tied together in a self-synchronizing fabric. The patented Ambric BRIC™ architecture scales to thousands of processors using a simple software development platform based on hierarchical objects.

Ambric’s development tools accelerate customers’ time to market by reducing development time and efforts by more than half. Visit http://www.ambric.com for the latest news and information on the company.

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Ambric and the Ambric logo are registered trademarks and Ambric aDesigner and Ambric BRIC are trademarks of Ambric, Inc. All other legal marks are the property of their respective owners. For photos of the Ambric MPPA chip and screenshots of the Ambric aDesigner software tools, contact jean@akipr.com.