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To: DownSouth who wrote (12576)	12/11/1999 9:24:00 AM
From: 100cfm	Respond to of 54805

I found this to be an interesting article. althought this company is still a single cell organism it will be interesting to see if they can actually bring this technology to market and evolve out of primordal pond. 06 December 1999 Montreal-based Hyperchip Inc. on Monday got C$20 million from investors backed by some of the world's leading telephone companies to help launch technology that helps send data traffic into warp speed. The tiny two-year-old privately held semiconductor firm, which has about 40 employees, will use the funding to further develop router technology that moves data at the unheard-of rate of 1,280 trillion bits - or 1.28 petabits - per second. Hyperchip, seeking the lead in a fiercely competitive market to create high-speed chips that route network traffic, plans its initial product launch by late 2000. Industry titans are investing in several development efforts to hedge their bets on where the technology is headed. They include some of the world's leaders in telecommunications and network equipment: Brampton, Ont.-based Nortel Networks Corp. , San Jose, Ca.-based Cisco Systems Inc. , Murray Hill, N.J.-based Lucent Technologies Inc. , and Mountain View, Ca.-based Juniper Networks . There is a growing demand for technology that allows more information to be pushed through network pipes, fuelled by such bandwidth-intensive applications as the Internet, electronic commerce, and merging technologies such as video and phones. "The heads of development of Nortel, Lucent, Juniper and Cisco all agree they can't see how to handle anything beyond about 10 terabits (1 trillion) per second," Hyperchip President and Chief Technology Officer Richard Norman told Reuters. "That's where we come in. We see how to handle things up to 1,000 terabits per second and even further." Hyperchip's secret lies in so-called massively parallel semiconductor design. That refers to a high quantity of pipelines on a chip, or the assembly lines that decode and process instructions. While a Pentium 3 chip carries three large, fast pipelines, a Hyperchip chip uses about 300 small pipelines and can therefore process more streams of data traffic, Norman said. As consumer demand for such services as video conferencing increases, phone companies and carriers are increasingly searching for ways to handle that data-rich traffic. "You're basically seeing the death of distance. If you can send information as good as your eyes can handle...then really you can have something as good as a face-to-face meeting without getting on a plane and travelling," Norman said. While a voice signal consumes 64 kilobits per second of bandwidth, a TV signal takes 100 times as much. "The network is already overloaded. If you put 100 times as much on it, it's toast," said Norman. "The key to this is we're not going to get 10 percent more traffic or 20 percent more traffic - we're going to get a hundred times, a thousand times, ten thousand times more traffic." Founded in 1997, Hyperchip has already secured C$8.3 million in funding and the firm expects a third round of financing next fall to secure another C$50-C$100 million. "We had lots of people who wanted just to put money in - we could have gotten a considerably higher valuation," Norman said of the latest C$20 million fund injection. "The goal is not the valuation this round - the goal is the valuation next round and the round after. So we brought in strategic investors." The company picked new financing partners including Siemens Mustang Ventures, the venture capital group of German telecoms equipment provider Siemens AG . Boston, Mass.-based Argo Global Capital, a fund backed by some of the world's largest carriers including Deutsche Telekom AG , France Telecom , Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. and Microcell Telecommunications Inc. , is another new investor. Montreal-based capital venture firm TechnoCap Inc. also added to the pot, remaining Hyperchip's largest shareholder. Hyperchip will use part of its present funding to triple its engineering staff to 80 full and part timers and expand senior management ranks. The firm is searching for a chief executive, said Norman, who now fills that role. Norman, who previously worked for the microelectronics unit of International Business Machines Corp. , has four patents issued and 35 others pending for the technology. regards 100