Tabula Makes Chips Upgrade Themselves, Gets Funding

Seeking to put an end to this age where all electronics rely on highly-specialized chips that get outaded fast, Tabula came up with chips that, like FPGAs, are customizable but much cheaper, faster and smaller, and it looks like it scored an investment to help it promote its invention.

Consumers will have probably noticed just how quickly consumer electronics, especially mobile devices, become 'outdated,' meaning that they are surpassed by newer generations.

While programs and applications can usually get away with updates and gain functionality or better performance in a simple process, hardware is not so fortunate.

Still, this does not mean that IT companies aren't researching ways of allowing hardware, or at least processors, to upgrade itself as well.

Until recently, FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) were the only so-called customizable chips, but Tabula came up with something better.

Basically, the company created chips that can upgrade themselves by cycling through different layouts, as covered better here.

Being faster, smaller and, most importantly, cheaper than FPGAs, such units could transform the industry, showing up in HDTVs, phones, multimedia players, etc.

In other words, a day may come when hardware will be able to update over the Internet the same way antivirus software or any other program does.

Of course, like any new invention, financial backing is required if it ever becomes practical. Fortunately, Tabula got an investment of $108 million, meaning that the 3PLD ABAX product family will keep evolving.

"The programmable logic market is seeing tremendous growth driven by the build out of the telecommunications infrastructure. This infrastructure build is necessary to keep pace with the global demand for more bandwidth to support smartphone usage for accessing data and video online." said Dennis Segers, CEO of Tabula.

"This funding represents a resounding validation of our breakthrough Spacetime 3D programmable logic technology and a vote of confidence for the Tabula team in its ability to bring about both technological innovation as well as business innovation to customers. We will continue to build on our customer momentum by increasing volume shipments of our ABAX 3PLD product family."