Startup's software turns uniprocessors into multicores

The startup targets compute-intensive market segments that use large amounts of repetitive logic or face footprint or system power constraints. Typical potential customers are developers of ICs for next-generation portable equipment such as PDAs, cell phones, GPS and mobile computing platforms. Mplicity has been working for Flextronics International Ltd. (Singapore) and Ceva Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) among others.

Ceva launched the X1641m a Quad-MAC DSP core in the scalable CEVA-X family in October 2006. The X1641 is designed to run computational intensive tasks that require substantial data throughput and high memory bandwidth. The CoreUpGrade offering is based on virtual multiprocessing (VMP) algorithms and tools which enable designers to reduce the number of wasted clock and instruction fetch cycles, thereby reducing cache size requirements as well as improving the average gate utilization factor (GUF), according to Gil Vinitzky, chief executive officer.

Mplicity was established in April 2002 and employs 12 workers. It was founded by Vinitzky and chief technology officer Eran Dagan. Vinitzky and Dagan worked together in senior development jobs at fabless chip company DSP Group Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.). Dagan and Vinitzky raised their initial capital from Stage One Ventures and Alice Lab. The two venture capital firms initially invested a little less than $1 million in Mplicity, but also undertook to make follow-on investments as part of a financing roadmap. The company has recently standardized on the Formality equivalence checking software from Synopsys Inc. and its retiming verification methodology for CoreUpGrade customers.

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