New Members Join Ambric University Research Program
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. | International |
| Boston University Protein Docking Simulation |
Imperial College London, U.K. Financial Market Simulation |
| Brigham Young University Computer Vision, Image Processing |
Halmstad University, Sweden LTE software-defined radio |
| Lawrence Livermore National Labs Image Recognition, Signal Processing |
University of British Columbia, Canada Computer architecture |
| Portland State University Machine Learning |
University of Santiago, Spain Video encoding |
| University of Southern California Medical Ultrasound |
University of Toronto, Canada Image processing |
| University of South Carolina Medical Image Processing |
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| Virginia Tech Software-defined Radio |
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| University of Washington Video Encoding, Computer Architecture |
“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[tm] 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.
Ambric and the Ambric logo are registered trademarks and Ambric aDesigner and Ambric BRIC are trademarks of Ambric, Inc.
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