21.7% of Northern Ireland’s exports amounts to around US$2billin, going to North America in 2005/06. Northern Ireland has been leading trade missions to the USA for a number of years. ” Today alongside its continuing world-class indigenous engineering prowess, Northern Ireland is pursuing a vision to become a world class centre of knowledge-led companies and internationally rated university research institutes specialsing in biotechnology, information technology, nanotechnology, communications and digital media”, says Tersea Madden, Invest NI’s Missions Manager.

Gary Hamilton commented, ”this is a great opportunity for Omiino to coordinate with Northern Ireland’s regional economic development agency in order to maximize the effectiveness of our visit to Silicon Valley”, he continused, ” we can focus on facilitating productive meetings with both new and current business contacts, while Invest NI looks after the local logistics and assists us with market research.”

Omiino have heralded a new era for virtual ASSPs, with the launch of a range of unique products that delivers a highly efficient solutions for specific packet optical network (P-OTN) transport spplications, whether PDH or NG-SDH, Ethernet or OTN, 2MBit to 40GBits or beyond.

For further Information, Contact

Gary Hamilton

Gary.hamilton@omiino.com

Tel: +44(0)28 9099 7390

Omiino develops “FPGA-based” silicon for telecommunications equipment vendors, according to Gary Hamilton, Omiino’s chief executive officer. The company names FOGA vendor Xilinic Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) as a partner, suggesting that it is programming up Xilinx FPGAs and selling them on.
A quote from the company’s website states “Omiino has responded and by pioneering the process of building solutions on the latest generation of commodity FPGAs,” the company states.

Elsewhere the company states: “Over the next few months we will be rolling out a family of high order framers and packet mappers for packet optical networks in the 10G, 20G and 40G and Ethernet segments. These FPGA-based Omiino solutions will compete aggressively with ASIC-based offerings.”
Their primary backer of Omiino is Crescent Capital, a Belfast, Northern Ireland based venture capital firm which has invested £750,000 (about $1.5 million). The rest of the money was provided by the management team, private investors and bank funding under a small loans guarantee scheme.
“So-called application-specific silicon requires vast up-front investment and verification costs. For telecommunications network equipment vendors the return on investment is getting longer for such devices,” argued Deirdre Terrins of Crescent Capital, in a statement.

In other words Terrins believes that networking companies can no longer afford custom silicon made at the leading edge of manufacturing and will therefore turn to programmable silicon with a lower development cost.

“We are delighted that Crescent Capital has recognised that our teams experience in telecommunications and silicon design gives us a unique ability to tap into this significant market opportunity.” said Hamilton in the same statement.

“We apply industry and silicon design understanding to create market defining industry specific integrated circuits.” he added before going on to say “With Crescent’s support we will be able to start developing our initial product offerings and development road-map. We are already in dialogue with several equipment vendors who have shown considerable interest in our product plans.”