Reconfigurable processor companies have struggled to gain traction in the past years but found it tough going due to a number of market forces, including a tough sell to get engineers to depart from well established design flows.

The latest rumor is that Japan's IPFlex is shutting down after a nine year struggle to get significant traction in the market.  Word from Japan is that adjudication of IPFlex was officially approved by the local court in Tokyo and the company is now under the control of the administrator.  The web site heralds IPFlex as "world leaders in dynamically reconfigurable processors."   The Japanese website is online but the English version has not been updated recently.

Tomoyoshi Sato founded Japanese startup IPFlex in March 2000 to develop the world's first high-performance and highly flexible reconfigurable microprocessor. Sato received initial financial support from a private investor, Kazuyuki Sato (no relation to Tomoyoshi Sato), who made his millions through the IPO of a Japanese dot-com company, Internet Research Institute. Kazuyuki Sato also assumed the CEO position at the time of the founding.  Another major investor was not a Japanese venture-capital firm but a Tokyo-based company called Dream Incubator. Koichi Hori, Dream Incubator's founder, has achieved prominence as a professional business consultant (he was formerly with Boston Consultant Group) and a TV commentator. Later Fujitsu became a key design and a very significant funding partner.

In late Aug. 2002, IPFlex announced the availability of samples of its first-generation product, DAP/DNA-HP (High Performance) processor, as well as the associated development software and evaluation board. The sample chip was manufactured using Fujitsu's .18-micron CMOS process technology.

The startup has tied up with Fujitsu and in 2004 both companies announced a jointly-developed  DAP/DNAR-2 (Digital Application Processor/Distributed Network Architecture).  From the early stages of DAP/DNA development, IPFlex has been building partnership with Fujitsu on the physical design and manufacturing. In December 2002, the two companies formed an equity collaboration and further tightened the relationship for their joint development work.  In December 2003, Fujitsu acquired a technology license for the dynamically reconfigurable processor from IPFlex, making Fujitsu its first strategic partner in development, manufacturing, and sales activities.

The company went through a succession of presidents. One of the company's investors, Dream Incubator, tapped industry-veteran Jun Nakai to replace Kazuyuki Sato as president and CEO of the startup for a time. Another president in the succession was Toshiaki Kitajima.  The latest president of the company was Masaaki Sogawa who is also president of Meiko Electronics, an electronics distributor.  It appears that Meiko, which was distributing the IPFlex line, was also a financial backer.

IPFlex was trying to sell the DAP/DNA processor for applications that require higher performance, lower cost and a shorter design cycle than FPGA or DSP/MPU solutions, and for which SOC or ASIC solutions are not practical due to expensive NRE cost and longer turn-around cycles. The company's primary target market is high-speed networking applications.  Later, the company developed lower cost versions for consumer applications.

IPFlex was one of the few fabless semiconductor ventures in Japan, a country that has long been dominated by large corporations. Japan has traditionally been a very tough market for local semiconductor startups, due to the nature of its business culture and many other reasons, including the difficulty in recruiting good engineers for smaller firms. As a consequence, most of Japan's semiconductor venture firms adopt a design-service business model rather than that of fabless supplier or IP provider.  Small Japanese startups also have hurdles in trying to access overseas markets due their Japanese mindset.