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Video - Phoenix 2 Chip - From Concept to Commercialization
Video - complete presentation at the Rice Business Plan Competition
Additional information including press releases of the university research |
Ambiq Micro, a new startup company based on microchip technology that has
been in development for the past six years at U-M, has been attracting the
attention of potential investors at recent business plan competitions. Ambiq
Micro was co-founded in 2009 by Scott Hanson (BSE MSE PhD EE '04 '06 '09)
and his thesis advisors, Prof.
Dennis Sylvester and Prof.
David Blaauw.
Ambiq took first place in the Michigan Business Challenge back in February,
2010, a feat that was reported in the
New York Times. More recently, Hanson and U-M business students David
Landman and Philip O'Niel (both MBA graduates from the Ross School of
Business) took their elevator pitch and presentation to the
2010 Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC), where they took home $54K in
prize money by earning the
DFJ Mercury Tech Transfer Investment Prize of $50K, and taking fifth
place overall in the competition. Ambiq competed against 42 teams from
around the world, pitching their technology business plans to more than 200
judges.
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The newly fabricated commercial prototype, currently
being tested, is an ARM Cortex-M0 processor with a wide range of
peripherals. |
“Imagine a microprocessor so tiny and long lasting that it can be
implanted in the eye of a glaucoma sufferer to measure the progress of the
disease,”
wrote Josh Hyatt in CNN Money.com. “That idea is what got CEO and
co-founder Scott Hanson excited about commercializing ultra-low-power,
minuscule microprocessors he developed with his professors.”
From that spark, Hanson helped develop a technology ideally suited for
very small devices with a wide range of potential applications. These
include sensors for smart buildings and smart homes, sensors for industrial
monitoring, body-worn medical electronics, next-generation smart credit
cards, and a growing list of ubiquitous computing applications.
“Ambiq Micro is leading the way towards ubiquitous computing,” said Phil
O'Niel in the
one-minute elevator pitch at the RBPC, “where microcontrollers are
embedded in everything from the clothes that we wear to the paint on the
wall. Unlike the processor wars of the last decade, it's not going to be the
company with the fastest chip, but the company with the most
energy-efficient chip that's going to win the day. To capitalize on this
opportunity, Ambiq Micro has developed and will sell the world's most
energy-efficient microcontroller, consuming orders of magnitude less power
than what's currently on the market today.”
The company's first research prototype is currently being tested, putting
this new company on track for finding their first commercial customers.
Posted: June 4, 2010 by
Catharine June
EECS/ECE Communications Coordinator
cmsj@umich.edu or 734-936-2965
Related Topics: Blaauw, David Integrated Circuits and VLSI Sylvester, Dennis Technology Transfer
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