Product Sales:
Westtech Management Consulting currently provides sales representation for the following companies. Each of these companies have a very unique and compelling product in their market place.
In2Fab
In2Fab (www.in2fab.com) has the only commercial solution speciallized for general porting of analog and/or mixed signal designs from one process generation to the next or one foundry to another, or both at the same time. They provide either a design porting service at their site, or they sell their productized EDA tools to enable customers to port their own designs. This technology now has about 6 years of high first silicon success rate history on more than 100 designs, and is silicon and production proven on a wide range of processes at semiconductor foundries and private captive fabs from from 0.5 micron through 65nm processes.
What particularly standsout about their products is that they can port typical analog or mixed signal designs such as PLLs, DACs, ADCs, etc. in a very short 2 to 3 weeks time, and complex analog designs such as PCI express in as little as 7 or 8 weeks. There are no complexity limits found yet. This technology has been used to port complex SOCs including digital in as little as 4 to 6 weeks.
The technology faithfully preserves hierarchy, and topology from source process to target process and supports mapping of passive devices such as resistors and capacitors to the same value on the target process thereby preserving reference.
The technology supports Cadence style p-cells and can remap from source to target processes and help clean up discontinuities that result. It can also port GDSII layout data. The technology will port both the netlists and layout. The EDA tools use a pattented technology called complex nodal scaling, which is significantly more than just optical scaling. The EDA tools have extensive support for complying with the increasingly complex "design for manufacturability" and "design for yield" rules that are prevalent in the advanced processes today.
Portland Bioscience
Portland Bioscience (www.pdx-bio.com) offers the only bioinformatic experimental design and analysis technology that comprehensively incorporates the impact of multiplex hybridization. This applies to all possible sample target and probe combinations. This is achieved by a combination of theoretical modeling of molecular chemistry and calibration with the only comprehensive thermodynamic database of mismatch, cross hybridization taxonomies and stabilities. There is no other company with this technology.
With each PdxBio project, results are captured and the database is continually expanded, resulting in the accretion of high informatics value. New types of data can be generated and employed to expand the database to include ever more complex molecular characteristics and chemical and physical behaviors. The technology is composed of a set of toolbox software routines and the database that leverages over 10 years of research and five years of PdxBio technology development. These tools can be rapidly deployed to provide a wide range of services and software products. The toolbox algorithms and database searching techniques are extremely fast and, unlike existing search and comparison technologies, primarily search for dissimilarities rather than similarities in hybridization interactions. This greatly enhances the quality of the results.
Impact on prior State-of-the-Art: It is often quoted that the state of the art in microarray design and analysis technology is between 60% and 99% accurate. In fact, the situation is much more complicated than being able to simply state an accuracy number. Today¡¯s technology either largely ignores complexities associated with multiplexing such as cross-hybridization, or does so in a very crude or limited manner. Experimental results may produce erroneous positive calls because of an accumulation of cross-hybrids on various probe spots. Some lab tests may be based upon only a few specific calls, so an erroneous positive could significantly obscure results. Additionally, a probe spot could be displaying a true positive, but may show a relatively weaker signal due to reduction of the target concentration which results from extensive cross-hybridization with other probes on the surface. Some cross-hybrids can appear to be even more stable than a perfect-match duplex. Consequently, a researcher may be unable to determine whether or not a reliable result has been obtained. A specific test may work well with one target sample, and be completely erroneous on a second sample. In the interpretation of final results, current technologies ignore the mutual influence of all possible reactions in the multiplex hybridization system.
There are many new high-throughput platforms that are either in development or being piloted. These will generate extremely large amounts of data which will require the type of system-wide analytical approaches provided by PdxBio¡¯s Multiplex Cross-Hybridization technology.
With PdxBio technology, a researcher can either design probes that will not produce erroneous signals with a specific target sample, or can premodel, or post model an experiment. This will enable the researcher for the first time to develop a quantitative understanding of the outcome of their multiplex hybridization reactions.