Becoming Europe's leading designer of powerful chips for artificial vision systems sits squarely in the sights of young Spanish high-growth company, AnaFocus.

AnaFocus specialises in the design of innovative and high-performance vision systems-on-a-chip and mixed-signal (analogue and digital) integrated circuits. The company's vision systems-on-a-chip technology, called Eye-RIS, was inspired by the workings of the human eye.

It is a compact, high-speed, artificial vision system, highly sought after by the automotive security, consumer robotics and surveillance industries. Their mixed-signal product range includes analogue-to-digital converters, digital-to-analogue converters and compressor-decompressors (CODECs) for high quality audio and speech applications.

Describing the use of Eye-RIS in surveillance cameras, Rafael Romay, AnaFocus' Business Development Director, says "If you put the chip in a camera, the person watching the monitor doesn't have to pay attention."

"The chip can be programmed to pick out salient details," continues Romay. "For example, it could detect each person wearing a red coat who passed in front of the camera lens in the past 24 hours. Such a camera could cost as little as $50".

AnaFocus is a spin-off company from Seville's Institute of Microelectronics in Spain, which was founded in 2001. Romay was the company's first recruit. Today, the company employs over 25 highly qualified electronic and electrical engineers.

Much of the initial development of AnaFocus' Eye-RIS technology is thanks to work carried out during the IST project DICTAM, which was spearheaded by the Institute of Microelectronics. The project developed a series of high-speed, mixed-signal visual microprocessors - christened 'Analogic Cellular Engines (ACE)' - capable of processing up to 50,000 images per second. The new chips, which form the core of the Eye-RIS technology, capture and process images in parallel, thereby mimicking the operation of the human eye.

"To risk oversimplifying," explains Angel Rodríguez-Vázquez, DICTAM's former project coordinator, "it could be said that the analogue domain represents the work of the retina, it does the pre-processing, and the digital domain the brain, which does the post-processing."

Since its establishment, AnaFocus has successfully won a string of investments and prizes. In 2003, the company raised an undisclosed sum from venture capital firms including Bullnet Capital. The following year, the company was a finalist of the Red Herring Innovation 100 award and, in 2005, Romay was named one of Europe's 20 leading entrepreneurs under the age of 35 by Red Herring Magazine.



Posted by: John    Source