Integrated Silicon Design Pty from Down Under is a company set up by Adelaide University in the South Australian capital to market the fruits of the university’s research – and, with its UK offshoot, Integrated Circuit Design Centre Ltd, in Twickenham, Middlesex, it is looking for a UK partner company for joint production and marketing of its Viterbi codec coder-decoder chip. The codec chip is a VLSI device that translates analogue signals into digitally encoded signals and corrects errors. The product was developed at the University, with funding under a research contract from the Australian Overseas Telecommunications Commission. Managing director of the company’s UK arm, Paul Burn, says that where the market for products like the Viterbi chip has been the domain of big companies bidding for large defence contracts in the past, it has now opened up to the smaller business. He points to the fact that smaller companies are now encouraged to take slices of big contracts, referring to the UK government’s UKP25m per year funding, over three years, of a Gallium Arsenide technology research and development project. Integrated Silicon Design has also appointed Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak to its board.
