EDN Magazine Presents Top Honor to Samplify Systems' SAM1600 Family of Analog/Digital Converters at the 19th Annual Innovation Awards

SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Samplify Systems, Inc., a next-generation mixed-signal semiconductor company, today announced that its SAM1600 family of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), integrated with the company's patented Prism(TM) real-time signal-compression technology, is the winner in EDN Magazine's 19th annual Innovation Awards competition in the ADC and DAC category.

Samplify received the honor during the awards ceremony hosted by EDN Magazine during opening day of the 2009 Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley, held in San Jose, California. The Innovation Awards, which honor the best technology, products and people in electronics design, are determined by a combination of the magazine's readership along with EDN's editorial staff and editorial advisory board. The voting, which ended late February, identifies a single winner in several categories and Samplify's SAM1600 family took the top honor in the prestigious ADCs and DACs category. Other finalists in the ADC and DAC category included the MAX5661 16-bit DAC from Maxim Integrated Products, the DAC9881 18-bit DAC from Texas Instruments, and the ADC12EU050 12-bit octal ADC from National Semiconductor. Samplify's winning entry can be viewed at http://www.edn.com/info/CA6631770.html .

"We would have been honored just to be considered as a finalist in the same category with esteemed analog companies such a Maxim, TI, and National," said Al Wegener, CTO and founder of Samplify. "Given these companies did make incremental improvements in analog performance of their nominated devices," Wegener added, "we are especially flattered that the readers and editorial staff of EDN Magazine understood and appreciated the value of integrating compression, our first digital kernel, into a data converter."

The SAM1600 family, integrated with Samplify's Prism signal-compression algorithm, provides a cost-effective and power-saving alternative to brute-force hardware approaches to transport and store large amounts of sampled data within systems. SAM1600 ADCs deliver twice the channel density while consuming only half the power of competing solutions. With these products, Samplify provides a complete, end-to-end compression solution which also includes the Samplify for FPGA and Samplify for Windows decompression engines.

The Prism(TM) compression engine in the SAM1610/05 is fully compatible with Samplify's existing FPGA intellectual property (IP) and software-based decompression blocks, enabling compression to be used throughout the entire signal chain

Samplify Rolls Production Quantities of Its SAM1600 Analog/Digital Converters with Real-Time Data Compression

World’s lowest-power, highest channel-count 12-bit ADC reduces I/O pin count and power consumption for high-bandwidth applications

SANTA CLARA, Calif.,—March 30 , 2009—Samplify Systems, a provider of mixed-signal compression solutions for intelligent data conversion, today ramps production of its innovative family of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) integrated with the company’s compression technology.  Developed to solve high-speed signal-processing bottlenecks, the SAM1600 ADCs have achieved production qualification on UMC’s 130 nm bulk CMOS process. 

“I am extremely proud of the Samplify team for the smooth transition of the SAM1600 family devices into production,” said Tom Sparkman, Samplify CEO. “Qualifying devices for production can trip up even the largest semiconductor companies, yet our team was able to go from sampling to production qualification without any changes to the die, an amazing feat considering having a high level of digital integration and having twice the number of ADC channels of competing devices.”

The SAM1600 family delivers industry-leading power consumption in a true 16-channel, 12-bit device, and just 44 mW per channel power consumption.  The performance of the SAM1600 family is further enhanced by the integration of Samplify’s patented Prism™ data compression technology, which reduces the number of LVDS I/O pairs, and thereby the power they consume, by up to 75 percent for high-channel density applications such as ultrasound front-ends, 4G wireless base stations, wireless repeaters, automated test equipment (ATE), and RADAR/SONAR receivers.  More information about the SAM1600 family can be found at http://www.samplify.com/sam1600.php.

“The SAM1600 family has already achieved design-ins with five customers,” says Horace Lai, VP of Technical Marketing for Cytech Ltd., Hong Kong, distributor for Samplify.  “With Samplify’s world-class support, our customers were able, for the first time, to measure performance which actually matched the data sheet.”

“Though we have only been partnered with Samplify for a short time, we have already been able to achieve design-ins for the SAM1600 with three of our OEM customers,” added Samuel Ge, VP of Field Applications for Excelpoint in Shanghai, China.  “Achieving production qualification is an important milestone for our customers in the medical imaging and wireless infrastructure markets.”