For a variety of target applications, Rapid Silicon creates application-specific FPGAs with AI capabilities. It greatly enhances design by combining private AI technologies with open source software.
Rapid Silicon, a maker of open source-based FPGAs with a focus on the intelligent edge and AI, today announced the completion of a $30 million Series A round. The business has secured $15M in capital from Cambium Capital and other sources, including all of the original seed round investors. In Q1 2023, the second closing is anticipated. The most recent amount of funding will be used to expand Rapid Silicon’s product line, support the release of Gemini, its flagship low-end FPGA device, and continue the company’s trend of promoting the use of open-source software in commercial applications.
Gemini is a power-optimized programmable logic device (PLD) designed for embedded and edge applications’ high sensor processing demands, constrained thermal environments, and constricting physical dimensions. The Raptor Design Suite software from Rapid Silicon is the first commercial FPGA EDA suite in the world to be built entirely out of open source code. In the most recent EPFL Combinational Benchmark Suite competition, the Raptor Design Suite performed better than all other top EDA tools.
“Customers are looking for innovative ways to program FPGAs, reduce support load by leveraging the open source ecosystem of active expertise and development engineers, and shorten time-to-market,” said Dr. Naveed Sherwani, Chairman and CEO of Rapid Silicon. “With open-source software, Rapid Silicon is removing the barriers and providing its customers with a robust end-to-end FPGA design workflow. The open-source software enables users to design complex applications quickly and efficiently on our FPGA devices.”
“Driven by its purpose and world-class talent, we believe Rapid Silicon is ready to revolutionize design-to-silicon turnaround time and provide solutions that meet and exceed the robust performance, power, area, and time-to-market requirements for next generation applications,” said Landon Downs, Managing Partner at Cambium Capital. “We see immense potential in the company’s AI-enhanced EDA tools, and we believe this team has the experience needed to bring these solutions to the global market.”
