Nuvation CURRENT | eNewsletter

Message from Nuvation's CEO

Greetings, and best wishes, to you and your family during this holiday season. Nuvation has had an amazing year - in fact our best year in company history. We know this was only possible thanks to our amazing clients, staff, partners and investors! I wish I had the space to thank you each individually, but you know who you are! Our 2005 growth projections are just as ambitious, and we look forward to another great year together!

Some of our leading edge technology projects include a board with a 16 lane PCI-Express implementation - built first-time-right on a 34-layer PCB no less! We also designed a revolutionary wireless surveillance system using all the latest video and wireless technologies. We hear our customer's product has been awarded the 2005 International CES Innovations award for excellence in design and engineering. Not to have our digital team steal the show, our analog team designed a 104MHz precision analog subsystem with a 9 femtosecond jitter (military project). One of our current projects is designing a highly advanced system for automated landing of military and commercial aircraft using an RF angle of approach system. Our current projects range from redesigning electron microscopes to portable readers for encrypted medical records stored on a credit card.

Our Waterloo Design Center is up and running! This new engineering office will be the primary hub of our expanding FPGA IP Core Business, as well as extend our design services capabilities. The WDC has received a pleasantly surprising level of publicity, including The Record, a regional newspaper similar to the San Jose Mercury, and the Globe and Mail, a Canadian financial newspaper similar to the Wall Street Journal. In this issue of CURRENT, you'll find articles describing some of our existing IP Cores - including a physical layer 16 lane PCI Express core, and a discussion on our directions for IP.

In addition to expanding our FPGA IP business, Nuvation sees a growing opportunity for the application of FPGAs in the market of High Performance Computing (HPC). Should you have customers or colleagues with tough processing problems that require hardware acceleration, we would be very interested in an introduction!

Nuvation has always put a strong importance on a fun company culture where staff enjoy their time together - both in the office and out of the office! In September we completed our fourth annual Hike For a Cure, where over 160 hikers climbed Half Dome to raise funds and awareness for Histiocytosis. Thanks to all those who supported this hike!

We also had CycloneBot, our combat robot sponsored by Altera, compete at the Robot Fighting League Nationals in San Francisco. CycloneBot captured fourth at the national competition. Many of our CURRENT readers enjoy following CycloneBot, so we included a link to the article in FPGA Journal that details the recent event. Should you like to see our weekend warriors in combat, our next event is ROBOlympics in March at San Francisco University. We will be competing with three robots at this event: Altera's Cyclonebot, Freescale's T.U.B. - a 340 pound pneumatic flipper, and Killer Moose - our lightweight vertical spinner.

Continuing to keep it fun, a large crew from Nuvation ran this year as team "Running Amuck" in the Providian 199 mile relay race from Calistoga to Santa Cruz, and we are training now for the San Francisco half marathon in February!

Thanks for your interest in Nuvation and for taking the time to read our newsletter. Consider having our team help you with your next FPGA, board, embedded software, or signal integrity project. If you already are a Nuvation client, we look forward to our next project together. If we haven't worked together yet, we'd love to include you among our many happy customers!

Michael Worry
CEO, Nuvation Engineering