Flex Logix Technologies, a supplier of embedded FPGA IP and software, has secured USD5 million in a Series B equity financing.
Led by existing investors Lux Capital and Eclipse Ventures, with participation from the Tate Family Trust, this new round of funding will enable Flex Logix to expand its sales, applications and engineering teams to meet the growing customer demand for its embedded FPGA platform in a variety of applications such as networking, government, data centres and deep learning.
"We believe that Flex Logix's embedded FPGA has the potential to be as pervasive as ARM's embedded processors have become today," says Peter Hebert, managing partner at Lux Capital. "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 broad range of applications."
Flex Logix's technology increases the return on investment required to bring complex chips to market. With readily-available, high-density blocks of programmable RTL in any size and with the features a customer needs, designers now have the flexibility to customise a single chip for multiple markets and/or upgrade the chip while in the system to adjust to changing standards such as networking protocols. Customers can also easily update their chips with the latest deep learning algorithms and/or implement their own versions of protocols in data centres. In the past, the only way to accomplish these updates was through expensive and time-consuming new mask versions of the same chip.
"The Flex Logix platform is the best, most scalable and flexible embedded FPGA solution on the market today, delivering significant competitive advantages in time to market, engineering efficiency, minimum metal layers and high density," says Pierre Lamond, partner at Eclipse Ventures. "These patented technology breakthroughs combined with an experienced management team led by Geoff Tate, the founding CEO of Rambus, strongly position the company for rapid growth in the future."
"We now have customers with working silicon, multiple licensees and are seeing our first repeat designs," says Tate, CEO of Flex Logix. "With a large number of customers in active, detailed evaluation of our technology for a wide range of applications, we expect significant growth of our customer base in the near term. As a result, we're staffing up 'ahead of the curve' to ensure we can satisfy the demand."
