Mr David Harrison, vice-president (software), Cradle Technologies, said, "Cradle's UMS changes the way System-on-a-chip solutions are developed as it significantly reduces time to market, solves many of the integration problems, reduces hardware and is highly cost-effective." The chip can deliver about 20 Gflops of performance.

Cradle has a business model similar to Intel's of developing a family of chips and having other people develop software for the platform. Mr Harrison said the value proposition of the UPS will be good enough to get people to develop software. This is being positioned as an alternative to the capital intensive-time consuming ASICS and field-programmable gate arrays. The company has filed for five patents in the area. OEMs are under pressure to deliver advanced products more rapidly but traditional design methodologies such as ASIC development were not suited to meet these new demands and this presented a huge opportunity for Cradle's chips. Apart from the chips, Cradle will also market basic development tools and software libraries for supporting OEMs and allow solution partners to develop intellectual property.

Harrison said the technology was first explored as an R&D project at Cirrus Logic's development centre in Pune. Subsequently, the project was spun off into a start-up company - Cradle Technologies India Pvt Ltd. The parent company Cradle Technologies is a fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Fremont, California with Satish Gupta as CEO, president and co-founder.Cradle has raised funds to the tune of $34.5 million. In addition to Cirrus Logic Inc, Cradle's first round of investors include Mr Kanwal Rekhi, Dr Suhas Patil, Gordon Bell and Safi Quereshey. Cradle has the backing of five other Venture Capital Funds and has completed three rounds of funding.