NioCAD, a spinout from South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, has secured R12.5 million ($1.7M) in second-round funding from South Africa’s Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) to commercialize its first product, expected to launch in February. NioCAD has developed an end-to-end design automation tool for building superconductive integrated circuits. As current processor and telecom technologies approach their physical performance limits, superconductive electronics make the strongest case for taking circuit technology to the next level, according to NioCAD CEO Retief Gerber. The technology “has the potential to fast-track fields as diverse as supercomputing, telecom, and life-like 3D virtual reality with sub-TeraHertz processor core speeds functioning at low switching power,” he explains. “Sensor and imaging applications will also benefit, as superconductive circuits make for ultra-sensitive sensors.”<\/p>\n
Growth of the technology has been limited due to the absence of integrated design automation tools for such circuits. NioCAD’s technology addresses that shortcoming by offering an integrated architecture catering to schematic and cell-based design, circuit analysis, optimization, and physical design. The integration of physical and schematic design through a unifying data model is entirely new, Gerber says. The technology offers the advantage of instantaneous forward and backward propagation of changes between the two environments and enables simultaneous circuit extraction and verification. “For the first time, circuit optimization can be done on the actual physical layout rather than symbolic models, making it possible to model critical components much more accurately,” Gerber points out.<\/p>\n
The NioCAD technology was developed in a lab at Stellenbosch’s electrical and electronic engineering department, whose chair, Willem Perold, PhD, headed the research team and serves as company co-founder. InnovUS, the Stellenbosch University-owned entity responsible for the university’s tech transfer program and IP management, provided incubation support to NioCAD and assisted in its spinout. The company is currently selecting distribution channels, producing user and training materials, establishing support lines, and devising licensing models.<\/p>\n