Message from Nuvation's CEO

Welcome to the Summer 2009 edition of Nuvation’s CURRENT! May marked our 12th year of service to the technology industry and we are seeing renewed growth in our business. We understand the market has been tough for most everyone, and hope that you too are seeing signs of a market rebound. As always, we appreciate all of the support from our customers and business partners that has allowed us to flourish even during market downturns.

In response to the market conditions, we have focused on some clear, measureable objectives to strengthen our value to our clients. First, we have sold off our Shanghai Design Center in order to focus on our core business of providing the absolute best engineering skills, execution, and dependability from our North American design centers. Second, we have increased our focus on methodologies to improve engineering efficiencies and reduce our clients’ NRE. For example, we have implemented more efficient and ERP-measurable design flows and substantially increased our IP re-use including an improved system for managing schematic symbols, layout footprints, FPGA cores, FW drivers, and system-level reference designs. Third, we have improved our Quality Processes including automated monthly polls on all of our active client projects with closed-loop quality improvement and compensation-based customer satisfaction metrics for all levels in our services firm. While we are very proud of our 98% customer sat rating last year we remain focused on our areas of improvement.

Our twelfth year in operations was an eventful one. We launched Nuvation’s eStore, making it easier for engineering departments everywhere to purchase Nuvation reference designs. We now have a multitude of reference designs available including the IP Camera Mini DM6446 and DM357, IP Camera PoE DM6446, DM357, and DM365, Intelligent Video Server (IVS) DM6446 and DM357, and Multichannel Video Front End (McVFE) DVR reference design. We have shipped engineering eval units across the Americas, Europe, Russia, Israel, China, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere.

We are pleased that one of our FPGA storage core licensees successfully deployed a RadHard version of our core into space. We have also recently introduced a new version of our popular ATA-5 Host Controller FPGA core, now with Xilinx PLB interface for Spartan 3/6 and Virtex 4/5/6. Our SATA Host Controller FPGA core for Altera’s newest device platforms will be going out to Early Customer Acceptance Test sites this month and we will be taking this core through industry certifications later this summer.

Nuvation’s AirHockeyBot caught the nation’s attention including over 100,000 YouTube hits during its debut week at the Freescale Technology Conference. EE Times, Popular Science magazine, Fox News and other nationally televised programs ran coverage. As this issue goes to press, the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh is opening a massive robotics display called RoboWorld. Nuvation’s AHB-1000 will be one of the feature exhibits.

We continue to be active in the robotics sector with continued victories for our ‘battlebots’ team. RoboGames is our annual global competition and will be held in San Francisco this year June 12-14. If you’re in the area, please stop by to see us as our world champion combat robots attempt to defend their top rankings. Ziggy is our superheavyweight robot sponsored by Freescale with a 9RS08 controlled pneumatic flipper. He has held the gold medal for the past 3 years, but there will be a new army of competitors designed specifically to unseat it. Texas Heat, our lightweight flamethrower robot sponsored by Texas Instruments, will be looking to improve its #2 global standing with a new closed loop ignition algorithm on its MSP430 weapons controller.

If you’re in the Dallas area, we will be exhibiting our Video Security reference designs at the Texas Instruments Technology Day June 16-17, including our new DM365-based IP Network Camera reference design. I’ll be there personally and will be speaking in the seminar tracks about the low-cost/high volume design principles our engineering teams have devised.

We really enjoy being in the services business and working so closely with all of our clients across a multitude of exciting programs. Due to the sensitive nature of our work, I will just mention a few things that may be relevant to our audience. Our defense business continues to grow and we maintain not only ITAR facilities in the San Jose location but also Canadian Controlled Goods Program (CGP) in our Waterloo center. We have several medical projects involving video/imaging and one that will soon solve a major headache. We have been very busy with broadcast video system designs including some very leading edge processor blades and backplanes, along with specialized video processing in FPGAs. The video security market continues to innovate with the latest technology and we are active on a number of product developments in that field. We are also working on new biometrics designs involving our best analog, power, and mixed-signal design skills. We have some novel products under development involving custom RF implementations of UWB and others with LED Lighting. We have started working with TI’s new OMAP3 SoC for mass market applications. We have a video display project nearing completion, also based on TI multicore SoC technology. And we’ve finally closed direct business with a major telecom client we’ve been pursuing since our inception. Now that we’re over the AVL hurdle… ;-)

On a personal note, I’m excited to announce that my nephew, Nolan, has founded a FIRST Robotics team at his high school with Nuvation mentors. FIRST is “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”. The sport combines high school students with professional engineering mentors to build an autonomous robot, from scratch, in only six weeks. Sound like a script for Ocean’s 14 well beyond the reach of high school students? Tell that to the 42,000 students competing on over 1,700 teams! Founded by Dean Kamen, his vision is “To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of being science and technology heroes.” FIRST is founded on the premise that society gets what we celebrate. The problem is that so many kids nowadays grow up in an environment where by the time they are 10 or 12, they think their options in the world are being in the NBA or being in Hollywood. The audacious goal of FIRST is to break the stereotype of what is important in our culture. FIRST is about giving high school kids the chance to work alongside professional engineers to feel the thrill of innovation and inspiration of creation. Here at Nuvation, we live on that. Nolan’s team brought home the trophy for the Rookie Inspiration award. (Proud uncle.)

Lastly, please mark your calendars for the 2009 Hike for a Cure. On September 27th we will make our ninth annual pilgrimage to the top of Half Dome in Yosemite in an effort to raise funding and awareness for Histiocytosis, a rare childhood disease that has affected our family and many others. This is an incredibly strenuous day hike but nothing compared to what a child with Histiocytosis must endure. To date we have raised nearly $1M and your contributions and support have enabled unprecedented progress towards a cure. Online registration is now open and if you’re interested in joining us, please sign up early as we must cut off registration once we reach our maximum permitted by Yosemite Park.

For all of your support and best wishes, we thank you and wish you a successful 2009.

Warm regards,
Michael Worry
Nuvation CEO