Cradle
Technologies & C-DAC Co-operation |
Cradle
Technologies of USA has developed a revolutionary,
computing platform called the Universal Micro-System
(UMS). Current and former C-DAC employees have made
significant contributions to this technology. In this
article,David Harrison,Vice President, Cradle Technologies
briefly discusses the UMS technology, some of its
applications, the company Cradle Technologies and
the contributions from C-DAC.
The
UMS platform provides a family of off-the-shelf, completely
programmable chips that vary in their computational
and input/output power. The first UMS chip will have
approximately 50 independent processors that can work
in parallel. Other chip family members will have from
20 to more than 100 processors. You can think of a
UMS chip as providing close to the power of a PARAM
supercomputer. In addition to providing tens of GFlops
performance and tens of MB/sec memory bandwidth, the
UMS has completely programmable interfaces. The UMS
supports interfaces such as PCI, Ethernet, 1394, Utopia-2
on any of the pins.
We
developed the UMS architecture over a period of 5
years including extensive research and software development
in 3-D graphics, video, audio, imaging, modems, communications
and networking. Cradle has marquee customers from
around the world developing applications in all of
the above application areas.
We
formed Cradle Technologies in July 1998 to commercialize
the technology originally developed as part of Cirrus
Logic. The company has over 70 employees with offices
in Silicon Valley, California; Boston, Massachusetts
and Cradle-India in Pune. Cradle has an experienced
management team (including CEO Satish Gupta), a distinguished
board of directors (including Suhas Patil and Gordon
Bell), and a well-known technical advisory board (including
Albert Yu of Intel). Cradle has received funding from
several venture capital firms.
Suhas
Patil first suggested that the UMS technology could
benefit from C-DAC supercomputer expertise in early
1997. We started our first Indian development project
in Pune with one former C-DAC employee in late 1997.
We
wanted to prove that engineers could develop cost-effective
systems quickly using UMS technology. We thought that
we could do this easily in Silicon Valley because
we invented the architecture. If an Indian team could
do this with minimal communication using our initial
software tools, we felt we would get a better assessment.
The Indian team astounded us by performing better
than the Silicon Valley team. In less than 6 months,
the team of 5 new engineers developed a complete DVD
player including video decoder, audio decoder, a/v
synchronization and driver software
Two
former C-DAC employees, working in our Cradle-India
office recently won the Cecil Kaplinsky award for
outstanding technical achievement. My long-time friend
and Cradle founder Cecil Kaplinsky dedicated much
of the last 5 years of life to inventing the UMS technology.
We honour him with an annual award. Dr R.K Singh and
Vinayak Pore developed a complete MPEG2 video encoder
for the UMS platform. One of our customers recently
abandoned an ASIC project to do the same thing after
spending more than 100 man-years of effort.
We
started our first project with C-DAC in 2000 to develop
an Ethernet-MAC interface. We have been delighted
with the progress made by Atul Bodas. Atul has a working
prototype of the Ethernet-MAC and has made many valuable
suggestions resulting in improvements to the UMS architecture
and software development tools. Cradle & C-DAC have
recently started a second project in the area of Virtual
Private Networks (VPN). We look forward to C-DAC defining
and developing innovative VPN solutions.
Cradle
promotes open software development, has free software
development tools, will help developers market their
software intellectual property and will make its own
software libraries freely available. We believe that
the UMS platform provides the Indian engineering community
the opportunity to take a leadership position in the
worldwide systems market. We look forward to C-DAC
helping us make this a reality.
 David
Harrison
Vice President
Cradle Technologies
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