Our Best Year Ever!

Welcome to the Fall edition of Nuvation’s CURRENT.  This year has been magnificent, our best year since our inception nearly 10 years ago!  A special thank you to all our partners and clients for being part of the ever-growing team!

Talking about growth, both our San Jose and Waterloo offices have expanded with the addition of new amazing talent to our current roster of top notch engineers.  In fact, we’ve doubled our sales and account management team to support all our new clients, and we’ve added a sales office in Orange County to give local support to our clients in the Southwest.   

Some of the products we are currently developing include a 3D imaging system for a high-end security system, an automotive video design for a giant consumer electronics firm, a talking electronic toy, a high-volume PC accessory, a leading pro-audio system, a green-energy power control system, some manufacturing/test equipment including one involving “foops”, and a number of novel medical devices and defense/security products.  We enjoy working with all of our clients in a services model, and always appreciate the trust you put in us to deliver quality results. 

In this final issue of 2006, we focus on video, with our new IP Camera Reference Design, and shine the device spotlight on Pixim’s D2500 Orca chipset.  Ben’s 3-part article on Power Supply design principles concludes with Active PFC design.

We have been extremely active over the last quarter, debuting our IP Camera at the ASIS security show in San Diego, showcasing our new combat robot Texas Heat all over Silicon Valley, Texas, and beyond, announcing new ATA OPB cores for Xilinx EDK, and becoming a Cypress CYPros certified member to provide design expertise with EZ-USB and FX2 product families.  We also had our best ever Hike for a Cure, our annual hike up Half Dome in Yosemite to raise funds and awareness for Histiocytosis.  Every year many Nuvation employees join us on the 18+ mile hike, and this year the hike is over $90k in funds raised!

Our combat robots are doing incredibly well.  For those of you who follow the Nuvation-CM Robotics team, we now have three competition robots in three weight classes.  Our lightweight, Texas Heat, is a TI-sponsored flame-thrower that cooks its competition with a 6 foot high-intensity flame controlled by a MSP430.  Often battles leave our competitor too hot to be picked up without gloves!  CycloneBot continues to shred its competition and the half inch titanium shell is so far unpenetrated as we dish out thousands of g’s of hitting power.  Ziggy, our new Freescale-sponsored super-heavyweight, is dominating as well, with a pneumatic flipper powerful enough to toss a pickup truck.  This 340-lb gold-medal winner uses a ZigBee-wireless link and a 9S08 processor to feed telemetry data back to the driver during combat.  In our last competition, Ziggy notched four straight victories to take an undefeated first place!

That’s all for now and thank you again for all of your support.  We wish you a great finish to 2006 and a prosperous new year!

Happy Holidays,

Michael Worry
Nuvation CEO