Bernie Aronson is a colorful yet no-nonsense guy – a leader that has contributed to the growth of the EDA industry. Bernie possesses both technical and financial knowledge, a characteristic too often lacking in CEO’s of EDA companies.

Our industry is overly engineering oriented and suffers from its general lack of sophistication in its forays into financial circles. To be sure, an EDA company needs engineering excellence, but it alone will not bring success. To achieve a successful exit strategy, investors need someone in the company that understand the technology and can communicate it in terms the financial markets appreciate. Bernie is just such a person.

I was intrigued when Bernie decided to join Kilopass, a company I had been introduced to a few month earlier. Kilopass has very interesting technology, but I was struggling to understand what its commercial applications might be and thus could not envision a pot of gold at the end of their rainbow. Now, I had the chance to let Bernie explain the Kilopass opportunity to me.

• Why did you join Kilopass?

  I have been involved at the executive level with several small companies, including EPIC Design Technology, as President, and Synplicity, as CEO. I joined both these companies when they were small, but with very valuable technology and wonderful people. In time, both companies became successful and I brought them public. This is very gratifying to me.

  I believe that Kilopass has many of the same attributes as EPIC and Synplicity – great technology and the need for it, along with excellent people in technology, management and operations. Working with a company like this when they are in their early stages is exciting and stimulating, like watching a child grow into a successful adult. I believe that Kilopass has all the pieces in place to become a recognized leader of embedded, low-cost, and secure non-volatile memory.

• What’s the opportunity at Kilopass?

  Kilopass, with its XPM memory intellectual property (IP) product, is addressing a market that is rapidly increasing in size and importance. The need for inexpensive, secure, embedded non-volatile memory (NVM) IP for SoC has increased in proportion with the pervasiveness of devices that store, send and receive data as well as video and audio content. The industry needs a way of storing firmware for embedded microcontroller, such as boot and program code, and end-user information and content that is consistent with the consumer-driven demand for low-cost appliances, both wireless and wire-line. Of the common existing embedded non-volatile memory technologies, neither Flash nor EEPROM has all the necessary cost, security, reliability and process scalability that are available with XPM. With this technology, Kilopass has a very large market opportunity to address a wide range of consumer, communications and computer applications.

• What are your plans for Kilopass’ future?

  Ultimately, I would like to see Kilopass recognized for its unique memory technology, along with identifying and understanding the many market opportunities that can use this technology. We want to be known as the company offering the most secure, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective embedded non-volatile memory solutions in the industry. I also know that a successful company goes hand-in-hand with the success of its customers. For this reason, I want Kilopass to continue to concentrate on our customers’ needs and to be ready to work with them with whatever is needed to help them be successful.

• What applications benefit from this technology?

  There are several applications that XPM targets, comprising both high bit-count and low bit-count density, currently served by other, less desirable memory technologies or other circuitry. High-density uses include field-programmable boot ROM, and firmware code storage. For low density applications, there are security keys, IDs, and IC configuration applications such as memory repair, circuit trimming and calibration, personalization of audio appliances and LCD displays, CMOS image sensor yield enhancement, and flexible implementation of customer-specific product features.

  Even though XPM is one-time programmable, it can also be used in applications that may require content updating, such as upgraded program code for a processor or revolving security keys, to replace more expensive and less secure flash memory. This is done by including one or more uncommitted sectors in the memory block along with the sectors that store keys or code. To upgrade a program-code module or security key, you program the upgraded module into an unused memory sector and switch control logic to point to the updated module. Hence the memory, which is one-time programmable on a cell-by-cell basis, is actually “few times programmable” at the system level.

• What’s the major differentiator?
  Our technology is the only non-volatile memory technology that is secure, scalable to new process technologies, field-programmable, and it does not add additional cost to a standard CMOS logic chip. Neither embedded ROM nor flash memory have all these attributes and new memory technologies such as FRAM and MRAM are a long way from finding their way into low-cost, consumer appliances. We have a non-volatile memory that is available now and has already been demonstrated down to 90nm. No one else has a production-ready memory technology with all these attributes.

I now understand: I hope you do too.

To comment on this article send email to:gmoretti@gabeoneda.com