Welcome to the Summer edition of Nuvation’s CURRENT!  We’ve just finished celebrating our 10-year anniversary in both our San Jose and Waterloo design centers.  It’s been a fantastic decade involving over 500 design projects through our doors, and we’re looking forward to an even bigger decade ahead.  Thanks to all of you for your support to help us reach this milestone.  Pictures from both events are online for your viewing pleasure.  A special thank you to our Engineer/Photographer, Jason Rothe, for photographing and creating a superb slideshow of the San Jose event.  I should also add that our TI-sponsored flame-thrower bot, Texas Heat, made an appearance at our 10 year anniversary parties both in San Jose and Waterloo.  Thanks to all who attended and made both our events so memorable! 

Wait, did I just mention combat bots?  :) Our combat robots have achieved many recent successes!  For those of you who follow the Nuvation-CM Robotics ‘Battlebot’ team, our Freescale-sponsored super-heavyweight, Ziggy, took the gold medal at the recent Robogames Championship in San Francisco. This 340-lb titanium robot has a Freescale ZigBee-wireless 9S08 telemetry system and features a pneumatic flipper powerful enough to toss a pickup truck.  Ziggy also took the gold medal at RoboGames 2006, and is proud to have defended it’s championship successfully!  Be sure to check out the video clip of the final blow from Ziggy defending its title against a formidable opponent and previous champion,   The Judge.  Texas Heat also did extremely well at both Robogames and Combots.  Texas Heat took second place at Combots, losing only to the Big B.  At Robogames, Texas Heat took the bronze medal out of 29 competitors, winning four straight matches, before losing in the semifinals.  One match included a satisfying victory of a rematch against Big B. J The Texas Instruments MSP430 controlled flamethrower is a crowd favorite for sure!

In this issue, we also have some great technical contributions from our engineering staff.  Faisal Ali shines the device spotlight on Altera’s impressive Cyclone III, which is finding its way into many new markets due to its 65nm price-performance.  Pete Sommerfeld distinguishes the uses of NAND vs. NOR flash in designs and shares some of his insights and design tricks to optimize performance. 

We have a number of clients starting projects with us now that are targeting year-end or Q1 2008 completions.  If you’re feeling the pressure to get designs accelerated and get more projects done in parallel, please contact Nuvation as soon as possible.  We’ve been very busy this year but we are always very committed to supporting your product development cycles.  It really helps us to understand your business and technical goals so we can best serve you, even if your project starts are several months away.  If you find yourself in an emergency crunch, please don’t hesitate to call.  Feedback from our clients and partners is continuously positive regarding our team’s technical innovation, professionalism, and execution culture. 

We greatly appreciate the relationships we have with our clients and the confidence placed in us to develop leading-edge technologies on challenging schedules.  It’s a great synergy and we enjoy working with all of you.

On a closing note, we are now gearing up for our seventh-annual Hike-for-a-Cure on September 30th.  It’s an 18+ mile hike to the top of HalfDome in Yosemite, with nearly a mile of elevation gain.  Last year we had over 190 hikers and raised a record amount of over $100,000 for the Histiocytosis Association of America.  Hope you can join us for the hike this year or at least make a pledge for a good cause.  More information can be found at http://www.hikeforacure.com.   I’ll be carrying my daughters Megan and Morgan as high up the mountain as my wife lets me. :)

We thank you for all of your support and wish you a successful finish to 2007!

Happy Canada Day and Fourth of July!

Warm Regards,
Michael Worry
CEO, Nuvation Engineering