Ericsson AB absorbs Multicore 'string processor' firm

Ericsson AB has purchased parallel processing accelerator board vendor Aspex Semiconductor Ltd. According to Aspex's company website, its team and its "on-going business" have transferred to Ericsson on July 31.

Recent reports have stated that Aspex repaid loans of $2.7 million since March 31 and that Spark Ventures plc expects to receive more than $10 million after completion of the sale.

Aspex, a spin-off with connections to Brunel University, was founded in 1999 to develop a multiprocessor technology known as associative string processing. While the technology was generally applicable, Aspex occasionally sought to focus on particular applications to try and gain traction in the market.

It ended up specializing in the development of software programmable media processors, based around its ASProCore DSP fabric, created and maintained by an engineering team including system architects, SoC designers, embedded software developers, and video compression algorithm specialists.

- Peter Clarke
??EE Times