ATEEDA raises £750,000 investment

ATEEDA, the Edinburgh mixed signal test company with a tool which allows digital testers to test mixed signal chips, has got another £750,000 from backers Archangel Informal Investment and the Scottish Co-Investment Fund.
"Recognition of the benefits available from our EDA tool, OptimATE, is growing fast", said David Hamilton, CEO of ATEEDA, "this new investment will allow us to support the high levels of interest in replacing analogue tests with simple digital ones."
The benefit the ATEEDA tool brings is cost. Using a digital tester significantly cuts the cost of testing mixed signal devices.
"We take companies' IC designs run through our software and generate test vectors on the analogue part of the chip which can then be handled on a digital tester. So you don't need an analogue tester," said David Hamilton, "it saves time because digital testers are highly parallelised."
ATEEDA was founded in 2006 to exploit technology previously developed with Scottish Enterprise's Proof of Concept funding.
Hamilton's co-founders are CFO Bill Buckie, Jane Karwoski McCracken, and Peter Denyer. In February 2007, Denyer led a seed funding round, raising money from the Scottish Seed Fund which is managed by Scottish Enterprise, the Synergy Fund (which is managed by Scottish Equity Partners), and the University of Strathclyde.
The company specializes in testing mixed signal devices which have both analogue and digital sections.
'ATEEDA has developed the world's first effective software tool that allows analogue sections to be tested on digital testers, enabling manufacturers to save substantial amounts of time and money', says the company.
The ATEEDA software aims to improve reliability, increase final test yield, reduce wafer probe test costs and multiply production throughput. "We have a solution the semiconductor industry has been seeking for years," said Hamilton.