Sunnyvale, California-based Logic Devices Inc has bought all the remaining assets of the former Star Semiconductor Inc of San Jose. Star Semiconductor was the developer of the proprietary Sproc stream processor programmable signal processing architecture, which is claimed to offer significant performance advantages in some data flow signal processing applications, performing concurrent parallel processing on multiple streams of data. Xylinx had $4m riding on Star, which claimed that the Sproc architecture addressed real world control functions such as speech recognition and machine vision, replacing multiple first generation signal processors (CI No 1,780). Star failed because while the development systems sold well, the firm was unable to generate sufficient sales of production chips to support operations.
