Technology Veteran, Financing Fuel Growth in New Digital Imaging Markets
WALTHAM, MA, July 15, 2004
-- ChipWrights, Inc., the leader in digital signal processing (DSP) technology for digital imaging applications, today announced that David C. Hunter has been appointed President and CEO. Mr. Hunter will oversee the next phase of ChipWrights’ growth as it expands its product line and ramps production to meet customer demand. Mr. Hunter has served for the past two years as a member of the ChipWrights’ Board of Directors, and will continue to serve on the Board.
Most recently, Mr. Hunter was Venture Partner at both BancBoston Ventures and Advanced Technology Ventures. Previously he served as Chief Operating Officer, Chief Technology Officer and a member of the Board of Directors at Aware, Inc., a world leader in the development of ADSL technology. During his tenure at Aware, the company launched a successful IPO, pioneered the development of the intellectual property (IP) licensing business model, and completed the development and early roll out of ADSL technology. By time he left the company in 2000, their customers had delivered more than 8 million ADSL modem chipsets based on Aware technology.
The announcement of Hunter’s appointment comes as ChipWrights has completed its fourth round of funding. This latest round garnered $13.6 million from the company’s existing investors, including: Rock Maple Ventures, SpaceVest, Axxon Capital, Axiom Venture Partners, Egan Managed Capital, Shiprock Capital, Adams Harkness & Hill Technology Ventures, Techfarm Capital, BancBoston Ventures, New England Partners, and Band of Angels VC Fund.
“We are fortunate to have David join the team.” said Dennis Costello, Managing Director of Rock Maple Ventures and ChipWrights’ Chairman. “His close association with ChipWrights enables him to take the lead without skipping a beat. His strong track record in scaling businesses and building relationships with major customers will be key to solidifying ChipWrights market leadership.”
“ChipWrights is delivering on its very powerful potential,” said Mr. Hunter. “We have a strong, differentiated digital imaging technology that satisfies demanding applications better than any others on the market. I will be building deep partnerships with leading customers in key digital imaging markets that need ChipWrights’ programmable technology.”
ChipWrights was formed in 1999 with the vision of producing the best programmable DSP solution for imaging applications in the world. Since then, it has developed three high performance, low power DSP chips optimized for these applications and additional products will be announced later this year that will extend ChipWrights’ technology leadership. The company has garnered design wins with leading imaging companies including Sony, Agilent Technologies, Noritsu and several others in a diverse range of applications in both the consumer and industrial markets.
The company’s value proposition is based upon providing customers with the best combination of the Five P’s: Price, Performance, Power, Peripheral Integration, and Programmability and a firm belief that the future of image processing will be based upon programmable solutions rather than fixed function ASICs. As system product life cycles get shorter and product requirements grow more complex, the improved flexibility of a programmable solution will provide tremendous benefits to the system designer and manufacturer.
The company works to partner with its customers by making available a complete set of development tools, reference boards, and application libraries. In addition, a network of third party DSP algorithm and application developers is beginning to emerge that can work together to create innovative and differentiated imaging products around the ChipWrights platform. The company has been widely recognized for its achievements. Last year the Semiconductor
Innovations Letter listed the company as one of the Top 25 Startups to Watch in 2003, Frost and Sullivan gave the company an Excellence in Technology Award, and the Fabless Semiconductor Association nominated the company as one of the Fabless Startups to Watch in 2003.
About ChipWrights
ChipWrights is a fabless semiconductor company specializing in the design, development, and marketing of a new class of digital signal processing-based devices called visual signal processors (ViSPs). Built on an innovative architecture comprising a RISC processor and a highly- integrated, scalable array of DSP vector processing units, this fully programmable, low cost, low power, and very high performance system-on-chip (SoC) family is ideal for building competitive products in the digital imaging and video markets. This includes applications such as consumer digital still and video cameras, security cameras, film processing machines, cell-phone cameras, and digital office equipment. ChipWrights provides a complete software development tool suite and hardware reference designs. Headquartered in the United States, the company has offices in Waltham, MA and Tokyo, Japan. Additional information is available at
www.chipwrights.com
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