ARM boosts 2024 Flexible Access Startup contest to $400,000
ARM and Silicon Catalyst have expanded the Flexible Access for Startups contest for 2024, boosting the main award to $250,000 with $150,000 for the runner up.
The contest is open to eligible early-stage startups that are part of or considering to be part of ARM Flexible Access for Startups, which provides free of charge access to ARM’s catalogue of compute and system IP.
The winner will be awarded $250,000 of technology credit towards a Flexible Access commercial tape-out, up from $100,000 for last year’s contest. Also new this year, the runner-up in the contest will be awarded $150,000 of technology credits.
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The awards could cover IP fees for a complete embedded system or significantly contribute to the cost of a higher performance application.
Alongside the technology credit, both the winner and runner-up will receive detailed technical feedback through an ARM Design Review where ARM engineers extensively review the design specification as well as a ticket to ARM’s invite-only ecosystem event and advice to enhance the investment pitch through a pitch review session hosted by the Silicon Catalyst Angel investment group.
“ARM technology is for everyone, and, through this contest, we are recognizing and supporting the next wave of innovators to grow their business and accelerate their SoC designs,” said Paul Williamson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, IoT Line of Business at ARM.
“We know that time to product and access to the largest possible market are critical for startups, with ARM providing free access to design with IP that will maximize their chance of success. The ARM Flexible Access for Startups program provides easy, open access to a vast range of proven IP throughout the product development process, with this supported by world-leading technical and ecosystem support. To date, more than 100 silicon startups have benefited from this access to ARM technology.”
“The winning and runners-up prizes of ARM technology credit through the contest represent significant investments for start-ups, so they can accelerate the commercialization of their products. This is a game-changer for silicon startups looking to design the next innovative SoC through the ARM Flexible Access for Startups program,” said Pete Rodriguez, CEO at Silicon Catalyst. “As a key strategic and in-kind partner, we are delighted to be supporting ARM through the contest and assisting the next leading silicon startups to deliver commercial success and business growth.”
The 2024 ARM Flexible Access for Startups Contest is open to privately owned startup companies in pre-seed, seed, and Series A funding that have raised a maximum of $20 million in funding. All contest applicant organizations will be considered for acceptance to the Silicon Catalyst Incubator/Accelerator. Judges for the contest include senior executives from both ARM and Silicon Catalyst.
The contest will run from today, March 11th, through to May 17th 2024. The contest winner and runner-up will be announced in June 2024. Contest rules and application details can be found here.
Last year’s contest winner was Equal1 Labs, an Ireland-based startup working on making quantum computing more affordable and accessible with Quantum System-on-a-Chip (QSoC) processors that use ARM IP technology. These integrate entire quantum computing systems onto a single chip.
Equal1, which is one of the top patent holders for quantum computing worldwide, put the winning prize of $150,000 of technology credit towards the tape-out of its fourth-generation quantum silicon.
“ARM’s support, partnership and technology credit through winning the silicon startup contest are invaluable to the development of our QSoC processors. Due to the focus on power efficiency and performance, alongside proven IP reliability and a robust supporting ecosystem, it is clear that the new era of quantum computing will be powered by Arm technology,” said Jason Lynch, CEO of Equal1.
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The two runners-up of last year’s contest were SpiNNcloud systems, a German-based start-up, entered its second-generation hybrid AI processor that enables large-scale AI across HPC, and Scotland-based weeteq with an AI enabled power and control system optimization technology.
The SpiNNaker 2, which is due for tape-out imminently, enables the construction of brain-like supercomputers with a large mesh of interconnected microcontrollers powered by ARM Cortex-M4 processor cores. This provides up to 10x more efficient large language model (LLM) processing compared to a high-end GPU and has been pioneered by ARM co-founder Prof Steve Furber, a senior advisor to the company.
Weeteq as the other runner-up is using the Cortex-M55 core and Ethos-U55 neural processing unit for SoC edge AI processing, which, when combined, will provide a 480x increase in AI performance for industrial and IoT applications.
www.arm.com; www.siliconcatalyst.co
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