10 Hot Emerging Vendors For September 2010

Lyric Semiconductor

Company: Lyric Semiconductor

The Lowdown: Lyric Semiconductor comes from a strong gene pool. The company was co-founded in 2006 by MIT Ph.D. Ben Vigoda, who worked on Lyric’s core technology, probability processing, for his doctoral thesis at the school. Lyric was also supported by $20 million in DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) funding. The idea is simple: create a specialized microchip that’s designed to calculate probabilities faster and more efficiently than the CPU, and then use the chip to tackle specific problems. The first such problem Lyric Semiconductor is attempting to solve is flash memory error; the fabless semiconductor’s flagship product, dubbed Lyric Error Correction or LEC, is designed to correct flash memory errors, a growing concern considering the increasingly huge number of devices using flash memory. Lyric launched LEC last month and earned the Best In Show award at the 2010 Flash Memory Summit.