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“Thinking inside the box”

Technology and Product Development Partner

June 2014 www.argondesign.com

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Founded in 2009 by three experienced entrepreneurs:

Steve Barlow

Co-founder & CTO of Alphamosaic; VC funded, trade sale to Broadcom ($123M)

Alan Scott

Co-founder & CEO of NMI Electronics; trade sale to Intrinsyc Software ($10M)

Roger Barker

Semiconductor Marketing professional; Eurodis, MediaQ, Broadcom, Nethra, Imsense

100% owned by Directors and Staff

Self financed, profitable

Based in the St John’s Innovation Centre, Cambridge, UK

Currently 14 people – actively recruiting

Sales of £1.9M to June 2013

Argon Design - Overview

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Founder Previous Projects – Global Success, High Impact

Apple iPod Video

Orange Videophone

NMI μ-engine

Alphamosaic VideoCore

Windows Smartphone

Gentner Video Conferencing Unit

Raspberry Pi

Apricot PC-Xi

Digital air traffic control radio

Nokia N8

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Product Specialisms

Embedded Products Mobile Products Concept Definition Product Definition

Electronic Engineering Software Engineering Multi/Many core FPGA logic

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Technology Specialisms

Processor Architectures RTL and

Semiconductor IP

Complex Algorithms Image and Video Processing Multimedia & Video Codecs User Interfaces

Network Processing & DPI 3D Modelling - SLAM

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We develop technology and products for our clients

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Recent Projects

Development of H/W IP for SoC debug system

H.264 video codec extensions for ManyCore

Competitor analysis of mobile phone video codecs

Technology review of camera ISP features & design

Developing technology platform for the base station of a “White-Space” network

Development of “Walkie-Talkie” product over cellular network

HEVC / VP9 decoder validation bit-streams

High Performance Trading using FPGA

H265 decoder IP

H265 encoder IP

Development of Weightless development kit & cloud configuration software

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Completed projects

Argon Streams – H265 Dialog – Multi Touch IC

Imsense – DRC Skin Cancer Detection Dialog – 3D Display

High Performance Trading

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Multimedia Product Telepresence Videoconferencing Room System

A full product design service for a start up

Proof of concept, performance analysis

Creation of detailed requirements specification

HW, PCB, SW, FPGA, Mechanical design

Timing analysis and simulation of PCB layout

Prototype build and test

Environmental and EMC testing

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Multimedia products (contd)

Argon has been busy levering mobile technology

Android port for Gumstix OMAP3 platform

Demonstration system for passive matrix OLED displays

2D -> 3D graphics display

iPad simulation for LED lighting control

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Another area that we are rather good at…

Complex Algorithms and

Image Processing…

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Our particular areas of expertise in image processing are

Camera Sensor Processing

Exposure control, defective pixel masking, adaptive Bayer/DNG to RGB conversion, white balance and colour correction, sharpening, dynamic range correction, geometric distortion compensation, autofocus, enhanced depth of field algorithms, image stabilisation

Image Analysis

Dynamic range, colour content, level of visual interest, or similarity to other images, attributes such as blurriness, blockiness or noisiness

Object recognition

The general approach is to extract features and then classify them using machine learning techniques. For example, object recognition using the Viola-Jones algorithm, which is most frequently used for face detection

Video Encoding & Decoding

JPEG, MPEG-2, and H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC and VP8, HEVC

Image Processing

Dynamic range correction

Canny edge detector used in

algorithm for measurement

of blurriness

Face detection using the

Viola-Jones algorithm

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Image Enhancement algorithms

Dynamic range, colour content, level of visual interest, or similarity to other images as well as attributes such as blurriness, blockiness or noisiness

Motion Analysis and Tracking

Motion estimation for video coding or object tracking for such diverse areas as security & surveillance, augmented reality, traffic management, medical imaging and video editing

3D Reconstruction

Capturing the shape and appearance of real objects from stereo images, multiple 2D views, panned motion or lighting and shadow to create a 3D model, used for medical imaging such as CT, MRI and ultrasound scanning, augmented reality

Image Synthesis

Generating novel images such as 3D views of objects or synthetic textures to replace areas of an image containing defects

Image Processing contd..

Image synthesis to enlarge

faces for video conferencing

Motion analysis used

for object tracking

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Examples of multimedia,

multi/many core and networking…

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Multimedia, Telecoms, Broadcasting, Network Processing

Manycore processors are ideal for network processing, so we have a growing expertise in this area:

• Hardware pre-processing in FPGA

• Packet classification on manycore processors using Qosmos ixEngine deep packet inspection software

• Analysis of resulting packets on manycore or CPU/GPU arrays

• Indexing and storing of extracted data

• A particular expertise is the analysis of multimedia content:

– Monitoring buffering and stalling

– Extracting and decoding video

– Summarising videos

– Monitoring videos for particular features

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A demonstration of how DPI and video analysis can be applied to mobile video streaming

Recent telecom project…

1 PC acts as a video

server streaming

video at different

rates to simulate

network constraints

2 WiFi emulates

wireless network

3 Users browse server

& stream videos

4 qualmon runs on TILEncore

PCIe card, captures &

analyses packets

5 Results are served

as a web page

6 Results are viewed

in a web browser

Network Video Quality Monitor

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Contd Network Video Quality Monitor

The DPI and video analysis program qualmon:

Uses the Qosmos ixEngine, running on a Tilera processor, to inspect packets

Recognises video streams

Extracts details of the stream from the container format and displays them

Extracts a representative thumbnail from the video stream

Recognises the player being used from the HTTP user agent and replicates its buffering model

Simulates the player’s buffer and displays the margin as a time graph, predicting when the player will freeze when starved of data

Decodes the video

Performs image processing to assess visual quality – blockiness, blurring and noise

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Some of our technology and multimedia clients

A FTSE100

company,

under strict NDA

A Fortune 500

company,

under strict NDA

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Client Quotes

Mark Hopgood, Director of Strategic Marketing and Business Development for

Dialog, commented that:

“Argon Design has impressed us with the high quality of their work and their commitment to

our incredibly short timescales. The demonstrator systems have been very well received by

our customers; they demonstrate the advantages of Dialog’s technology and have helped us to

win substantial new business opportunities ”.

Mark Richer, Chairman of StarLeaf, was delighted with this collaboration: “Argon Design have provided a first class product development service for StarLeaf. Their

attention to detail and commitment to the project have contributed to the successful launch of

our Telepresence solution”.

Karl Heeks, CEO UltraSoC Technologies "As a developer of cutting-edge silicon intellectual property UltraSoC Technologies have used

Argon Design on various projects where timely delivery of high quality design services has been

of paramount importance. They have delivered every time and I would have no hesitation in

recommending them to any organisation in the embedded system or SoC space."

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Partnerships and industry group memberships

Many-core processors

Network Intelligence SDK

Cellular and Wireless Network

- International

…and there are other strategic partners

Industrial Design Partner

International Technology

Network

Broadband and M2M

Communications SIG

Industrial Design Partner

Network Flow Processors

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Sometimes we create our own products…

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Argon Blaster – High Performance Network Traffic Generator

The Market Opportunity: Test Gear is VERY expensive and complex (100’s of K$)

Shared central resource in contention for use by engineering/QA/FAE/Support

Engineering developers wait in queue to test when code is complete, often too late.

The complexity is rarely used to test application software

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Argon Blaster – The Cost Effective Solution

A high performance network traffic generator

Argon software using Netronome NFE card

Cost effective tool for Eng/QA/Support

Supports 10Gbps line rate

Can generate millions of unique flows

Maintains inter-packet timing

NFE-3240 card

Full size PCIe gen 2 x8 card

2 x 10Gbps fibre interfaces

4GB of DDR3 memory

NFP-3240 flow processor

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Argon Streams is a set of reference bit streams available in variants for HEVC and VP9 video CODEC standards. It provides a formal verification technique allowing designers to achieve full test coverage for their decoder.

Argon Streams

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Argon Streams – benefits

HEVC/H.265

Only set of bit-streams providing full

coverage

Formal verification of every equation in

the specification

Find all errors in your decoder design with

our rigorous test suite

Go to production with complete

confidence that your decoder is correct

Full interactive coverage reporting

10 times faster simulation than reference

test bit-streams

Used by leading tier-1 IP and

semiconductor companies

VP9

Only set of bit-streams providing full

coverage

Formal verification against the VP9

reference code

Find all errors in your decoder design with

our rigorous test suite

Reduce simulation time without sacrificing

test coverage

Reduce risk for your video decoder chip

design

Go to production with complete

confidence that your decoder is correct

Full interactive coverage reporting

Shorter simulation times than other test

bit-streams

Used by leading tier-1 IP and

semiconductor companies

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And we are involved in an emerging technology…

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Weightless – A new solution for M2M connectivity

An exciting technology for M2M connectivity, enabling connectivity where other technology currently fails.

UHF spectrum penetrates buildings, allowing 5km range indoors, 10km outdoors

Low power consumption means >10 year battery life for standalone devices

No network or licensing charges

Low cost devices (~$8 for connectivity)

Secure and guaranteed message delivery

Up to 1k, connected devices on a single private base station

100k’s on a national base station

Global standard

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Argon is excellently positioned to develop technology for Weightless applications

Developed the first demonstration application for Weightless

Developed Neul’s Weightless basestation hardware

Excellent track record in M2M product development

Argon’s role in Weightless development

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How can we help?

cliff.dive@argondesign.com +44 1223 422355

www.argondesign.com

https://twitter.com/Argon_Design http://www.linkedin.com/company/511683

“Thinking inside the box”