The company was founded in 1988, originally as a consultancy specialising in the design and application of programmable silicon chip technologies, with a particular emphasis on digital video systems. The consultancy work provided seed funding for the development of products and now the company is wholly based on product and licensing revenues. The company is a private limited company, and currently there are no external investors or shareholders.

History

Industry Awards

Financial Highlights

Year End Financial Statements

UK Office Premises

Charity Policy

History

Founded in 1988, Active Silicon originally provided design and consultancy services using silicon field programmable gate array technology (FPGA), in particular using Xilinx technology. Shortly thereafter the company expanded its work to include full electronic product design. Clients included various blue chip companies such as Marconi, Kone Lifts and Amersham International as well as smaller ones.

After two years of consultancy and design, the company’s first product was developed in collaboration with another UK company, Data Cell Ltd, who in return for exclusive distribution of the product under an OEM relationship, part funded the development and established a world-wide distribution network. This product, the S2200, was launched in 1991 and filled a niche for video acquisition and display on Sun Microsystems’ Solaris based workstations. As a successful product, selling particularly well in the UK, USA and Japan, it provided steady revenues for the next 7 years.

S2200 - Video Acquisition for Sun SPARCStations

Following on from the successful S2200, the Snapper range of frame grabbers was developed.

One of the key successful aspects of Snapper is that it supports a variety of operating systems and hardware platforms. As well as the usual Windows operating systems, various specialist and realtime operating systems are also supported, such as VxWorks, Solaris, MacOS and LynxOS. Combined with the ability to support ISA, SBus, PCI and PMC form factors, the Snapper range has proved an exceptionally durable product range.

Launched in 1995 and continually improved and developed, Snapper is still selling well and now provides core image acquisition functionality to many industrial, scientific and medical systems and applications. The Snapper series of frame grabbers are available directly from Active Silicon and various appointed re-sellers around the world.

Snapper - Multi-OS, multi-platform video acquisition

More recently developed is the Phoenix range of high-end frame grabbers designed for high speed acquisition from digital cameras, using either LVDS or Camera Link connectivity and up to 36 bits wide. Available in a variety of PCI & PCI Express form factors, Phoenix is based on in-house PCI DMA technology developed specifically for efficient data acquisition. The Phoenix series of frame grabbers are available directly from Active Silicon and various appointed re-sellers around the world.

Phoenix - high-end digital camera acquisition

Another recent development is the LFG range of low cost standard frame grabbers, available in a variety of form factors and for a variety of operating systems, and supplied with royalty free JPEG and wavelet codecs. The PCI version, for example, is used in the chip sorting machine vision system described below. The LFG series of frame grabbers are available directly from Active Silicon and various appointed re-sellers around the world.

LFG - Low cost multi-OS, multi-platform video acquisition

Technologies developed by Active Silicon have some novel applications - one such application is the automatic sorting of casino chips. The picture below shows a machine vision based system, designed and developed by Active Silicon, and used extensively in casinos world-wide to automatically sort casino chips. The development of the system, as well as including patenting world-wide a high speed colour sorting algorithm, included the design of various electro-mechanical hardware and control software, illustrating the total system design capabilities in-house. The complete system is now manufactured and supplied by Active Silicon to a leading supplier of casino equipment and commands a majority share of the market world-wide.

Machine vision application - casino chip sorting

In addition to developing hardware products, various cross-platform software technologies have also been developed. These include a novel device driver architecture ( "CDA" - Cached Driver Architecture ); image read, write, display and processing code, and JPEG and wavelet video compression codecs ( "TMG Imaging Library" ); and a TCP/IP network stack ( "ASLSock" ).

Other more recent products and innovations are described under the Products area.

Industry Awards

For two years running, Active Silicon has won a place in the Fast 50 awards, which recognises the fastest growing UK technology companies.

Fast 50 Award 2000/01

Fast 50 Award 2001/02

Financial Highlights

Turnover and pre-tax profits. See further down for audited financial statements.

Year End Financial Statements

Year End Financial Statements available for download in PDF format:
(Mouse right click to "save as", or left click to open)

Financial Statements - Year Ended 31-Mar-03 (157Kb)

Financial Statements - Year Ended 31-Mar-02 (40Kb)

Financial Statements - Year Ended 31-Mar-01 (30Kb)

Financial Statements - Year Ended 31-Mar-00 (30Kb)

Financial Statements - Year Ended 31-Mar-99 (30Kb)

UK Office Premises

UK Office Premises, January 2002

Location Map: UK Office Premises.

Charity Policy

Depending on year end profits, Active Silicon has policy of supporting various charities. Last year for example, a sum was donated to the "Guide Dogs for the Blind Association" in order to sponsor a guide dog.

Please note that Active Silicon does not accept unsolicited telephone calls from charities - instead please send an email to:

Guide dog sponsored by Active Silicon