October 21, 2008 -- Inc. has announced its move from intellectual property (IP) provider to a fabless semiconductor company with the announcement of its first silicon products. Samplify's SAM1600 family maximizes the system value of its real-time data compression technology by integrating it into the data converter. This move positions the company to immediately address the multi-billion dollar data conversion and ASSP markets as application commoditized data converters become integrated with ASSPs.

Market research firm Gartner predicts the data converter market will grow at a cumulative annual growth rate of 5.3 percent to over $3.9B by 2011. "The data converter market remains an attractive segment with growth rates exceeding that of the overall semiconductor industry," said Stephan Ohr, semiconductor analyst at Gartner. "However, data converters are increasingly integrated onto larger systems-on-chip (SOCs). While this occurs frequently in consumer applications, it is now being applied to industrial, scientific, and medical applications as well."

According to Samplify, the company has penetrated a number of these markets with its Prism signal compression technology over the past 18 months.

Al Wegener, Samplify founder, chairman, and CTO, notes, "Creating 'intelligent data converters' by integrating the compression engine with data converters is the logical and most exciting approach for our industry. As important, this new business model allows us to bring a new design methodology for applications requiring compression/ conversion at the front-end, while allowing us to create more opportunities for decompression in FPGAs and software on the back end."