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Originally published on 07/11/2002
When the first IBM PC came out, one way to connect it to peripherals was through a serial connection, powered by what was then a new chip, the 8250 universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter, or UART. The ubiquity of cheap, standardized UARTs for computers, modems, and printers made the interconnection of computers and their peripherals much easier.
Fast Facts:
Ipsil
www.ipsil.com |
| CEO |
Velu Sinha. Last job: director of marketing, Broadband Office
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| HQ |
Cambridge, MA
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| Founded |
December 2000
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| Employees |
10
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| Market |
Embedded networking
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| Funding |
$1.5M in angel funding. "Considering" raising A round
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| Profitable? |
Projected in Q1 2003
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Serial cables and the more modern USB, FireWire, and Bluetooth have their places today, but the future of device-to-device communication is networking, not point-to-point cabling. However, building networking into a device may require hardware that costs more than the product it's connecting.
Startup Ipsil is addressing this with a low-cost Web server on a chip. The device takes electronic input and serves it onto the Internet; it can also take input from the Net and translate it into commands or data for equipment. CEO Velu Sinha says he's "de-layered" the IP stack (the collection of protocols that handle the different functions involved in moving data between a computing device and the physical network cable) and built a Web server in just 5,000 logic gates, on one low-cost chip. In quantity, his server chip should cost less than a dollar. An Ethernet cable costs more than that.
Devices with powerful CPUs and general-purpose operating systems would not gain much from the Ipsil technology, which offers only stripped-down network functionality. But the Ipsil "IP UART," as Velu characterizes it, could save engineers of lower-powered devices from having to support a lot of computing overhead simply to get their products online.
Velu sees the technology being applied first in low-cost IP telephones, webcams, and consumer electronics, devices in which a full-on operating system would be too expensive to support. Eventually he may build inexpensive serial-to-IP converters to get legacy devices, like manufacturing equipment, online as well.
- Rafe Needleman
email: rafe-needleman@catchoday.com
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