Profile Foundation built on FPGAs
Active Silicon turns 30 in
September.Greg Blackman speaks to founder Colin Pearce on building the company and the importance of FPGA technology
X
ilinx FPGAs have been central to Active Silicon over its 30 years in business. Colin Pearce founded the
company on 5 September 1988, originally as a Xilinx FPGA consultancy, at around the time Xilinx launched FPGAs into Europe. Now, virtually all of Active Silicon’s products use Xilinx technology, with one of the latest based around a Xilinx Zynq system-on-chip, targeting the emerging embedded vision market. Chris Beynon, now technical director, was
involved in the company from the start, and joined full-time a couple of months later as a significant shareholder, owning 26 per cent of Active Silicon; Pearce owns 51 per cent. Te balance went to Martin Bone and Keith Baker, who joined over the next couple of years. Before forming Active Silicon, Pearce had
worked on video broadcast standards, as well as spending a year working with Xilinx technology at a small start-up. ‘I realised the two – Xilinx FPGAs and video – could be interesting,’ he said. To get started Pearce remortgaged his house,
borrowed money from the bank, and bought a PC for around £2,000 – ‘that was a lot of money back then,’ he remarked. He knew the Xilinx distributor in the UK, through which Active Silicon got its first few sales leads as a Xilinx design and consultancy firm. Early projects included a hardware-based
controller for a liſt company, which turned out to be a long-standing client, and work on the Inmarsat maritime communication technology. In 1990, Active Silicon released its first
product, the S2200, a plug-in image capture and display board for the Sun Microsystems workstation. Te board sold well throughout the 1990s, with the last one sold more than 20 years later, in 2012. ‘Te barrier to entry for the sort of products
we’re doing was far less when we started than it is today,’ Pearce said. ‘Back then we had the ISA bus and an affordable oscilloscope to debug the electronics. But now, with the PCI Express Gen3 bus, you need an analyser that will cost in the region of £100,000. To start up now doing what we do would require a much larger capital investment.’ Pearce described Active Silicon as a privately
Colin Pearce
owned company that’s taken a medium-risk organic growth trajectory. ‘Today you’d need to borrow more money to start a vision company, which would invariably mean you have another investor involved, and they would push the business hard for growth,’ he said. ‘While there’s less chance of the business surviving on a higher trajectory growth curve, the ones that do would probably do rather well. Forming a company now, you might be forced down that more aggressive route because you need to borrow more money to get into the market, particularly in leading-edge hardware design, although this is less the case for soſtware.’ Active Silicon’s core market is OEMs, selling
machines into sectors such as life sciences, medical imaging, industrial inspection and various other high-tech niche industries. Systems for these markets oſten need components that will be available for a long time, which is what Active Silicon offers. ‘Tere has been an evolution of technology,
Camera Link Deca frame grabbers
14 Imaging and Machine Vision Europe • August/September 2018
particularly on the computer interface buses,’ Pearce noted. Te company’s first product was
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