Argon Design is a technology and product development company founded in 2009 that specializes in embedded systems, mobile products, and multimedia. It has expertise in areas like processor architectures, image and video processing, and networking. The company has 14 employees and has completed projects for clients in industries like telecommunications, medical, and consumer electronics. Argon develops both custom technology solutions and its own products like the Argon Blaster network traffic generator and Argon Streams test suites for video codecs.

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“Thinking inside the box” Technology and Product Development Partner
June 2014
www.argondesign.com

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Founded in 2009 by three experienced entrepreneurs:
Steve Barlow
Co-founder & CTO of Alphamosaic; VC funded, trade sale to Broadcom ($123M)
Alan Scott
Co-founder & CEO of NMI Electronics; trade sale to Intrinsyc Software ($10M)
Roger Barker
Semiconductor Marketing professional; Eurodis, MediaQ, Broadcom, Nethra, Imsense
100% owned by Directors and Staff
Self financed, profitable
Based in the St John’s Innovation Centre, Cambridge, UK
Currently 14 people – actively recruiting
Sales of £1.9M to June 2013
Argon Design - Overview

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Founder Previous Projects – Global Success, High Impact
Apple iPod Video
Orange Videophone
NMI μ-engine
Alphamosaic VideoCore
Windows Smartphone
Gentner Video Conferencing Unit
Raspberry Pi
Apricot PC-Xi
Digital air traffic control radio
Nokia N8

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Product Specialisms
Embedded Products
Mobile Products
Concept Definition
Product Definition
Electronic Engineering
Software Engineering
Multi/Many core
FPGA logic

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Technology Specialisms
Processor Architectures
RTL and
Semiconductor IP
Complex Algorithms
Image and Video Processing
Multimedia & Video Codecs
User Interfaces
Network Processing & DPI
3D Modelling - SLAM

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We develop technology and products for our clients

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Recent Projects
Development of H/W IP for SoC debug system
H.264 video codec extensions for ManyCore
Competitor analysis of mobile phone video codecs
Technology review of camera ISP features & design
Developing technology platform for the base station of a “White-Space” network
Development of “Walkie-Talkie” product over cellular network
HEVC / VP9 decoder validation bit-streams
High Performance Trading using FPGA
H265 decoder IP
H265 encoder IP
Development of Weightless development kit & cloud configuration software

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Completed projects
Argon Streams – H265
Dialog – Multi Touch IC
Imsense – DRC
Skin Cancer Detection
Dialog – 3D Display
High Performance Trading

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Multimedia Product
Telepresence Videoconferencing Room System
A full product design service for a start up
Proof of concept, performance analysis
Creation of detailed requirements specification
HW, PCB, SW, FPGA, Mechanical design
Timing analysis and simulation of PCB layout
Prototype build and test
Environmental and EMC testing

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Multimedia products (contd)
Argon has been busy levering mobile technology
Android port for Gumstix OMAP3 platform
Demonstration system for passive matrix OLED displays
2D -> 3D graphics display
iPad simulation for LED lighting control

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Another area that we are rather good at…
Complex Algorithms and
Image Processing…

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Our particular areas of expertise in image processing are
Camera Sensor Processing
Exposure control, defective pixel masking, adaptive Bayer/DNG to RGB conversion, white balance and colour correction, sharpening, dynamic range correction, geometric distortion compensation, autofocus, enhanced depth of field algorithms, image stabilisation
Image Analysis
Dynamic range, colour content, level of visual interest, or similarity to other images, attributes such as blurriness, blockiness or noisiness
Object recognition
The general approach is to extract features and then classify them using machine learning techniques. For example, object recognition using the Viola-Jones algorithm, which is most frequently used for face detection
Video Encoding & Decoding
JPEG, MPEG-2, and H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC and VP8, HEVC
Image Processing
Dynamic range correction
Canny edge detector used in algorithm for measurement of blurriness
Face detection using the Viola-Jones algorithm

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Image Enhancement algorithms
Dynamic range, colour content, level of visual interest, or similarity to other images as well as attributes such as blurriness, blockiness or noisiness
Motion Analysis and Tracking
Motion estimation for video coding or object tracking for such diverse areas as security & surveillance, augmented reality, traffic management, medical imaging and video editing
3D Reconstruction
Capturing the shape and appearance of real objects from stereo images, multiple 2D views, panned motion or lighting and shadow to create a 3D model, used for medical imaging such as CT, MRI and ultrasound scanning, augmented reality
Image Synthesis
Generating novel images such as 3D views of objects or synthetic textures to replace areas of an image containing defects
Image Processing contd..
Image synthesis to enlarge faces for video conferencing
Motion analysis used for object tracking

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Examples of multimedia,
multi/many core and networking…

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Multimedia, Telecoms, Broadcasting, Network Processing
Manycore processors are ideal for network processing, so we have a growing expertise in this area:
•Hardware pre-processing in FPGA
•Packet classification on manycore processors using Qosmos ixEngine deep packet inspection software
•Analysis of resulting packets on manycore or CPU/GPU arrays
•Indexing and storing of extracted data
•A particular expertise is the analysis of multimedia content:
–Monitoring buffering and stalling
–Extracting and decoding video
–Summarising videos
–Monitoring videos for particular features

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A demonstration of how DPI and video analysis can be applied to mobile video streaming
Recent telecom project…
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PC acts as a video server streaming video at different rates to simulate network constraints
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WiFi emulates wireless network
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Users browse server & stream videos
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qualmon runs on TILEncore PCIe card, captures & analyses packets
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Results are served as a web page
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Results are viewed in a web browser
Network Video Quality Monitor

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Contd
Network Video Quality Monitor
The DPI and video analysis program qualmon:
Uses the Qosmos ixEngine, running on a Tilera processor, to inspect packets
Recognises video streams
Extracts details of the stream from the container format and displays them
Extracts a representative thumbnail from the video stream
Recognises the player being used from the HTTP user agent and replicates its buffering model
Simulates the player’s buffer and displays the margin as a time graph, predicting when the player will freeze when starved of data
Decodes the video
Performs image processing to assess visual quality – blockiness, blurring and noise

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Some of our technology and multimedia clients
A FTSE100 company,
under strict NDA
A Fortune 500 company,
under strict NDA

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Client Quotes
Mark Hopgood, Director of Strategic Marketing and Business Development for Dialog, commented that:
“Argon Design has impressed us with the high quality of their work and their commitment to our incredibly short timescales. The demonstrator systems have been very well received by our customers; they demonstrate the advantages of Dialog’s technology and have helped us to win substantial new business opportunities ”.
Mark Richer, Chairman of StarLeaf, was delighted with this collaboration: “Argon Design have provided a first class product development service for StarLeaf. Their attention to detail and commitment to the project have contributed to the successful launch of our Telepresence solution”.
Karl Heeks, CEO UltraSoC Technologies
"As a developer of cutting-edge silicon intellectual property UltraSoC Technologies have used Argon Design on various projects where timely delivery of high quality design services has been of paramount importance. They have delivered every time and I would have no hesitation in recommending them to any organisation in the embedded system or SoC space."

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Partnerships and industry group memberships
Many-core processors
Network Intelligence SDK
Cellular and Wireless Network - International
…and there are other strategic partners
Industrial Design Partner
International Technology
Network
Broadband and M2M Communications SIG
Industrial Design Partner
Network Flow Processors

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Sometimes we create our own products…

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Argon Blaster – High Performance Network Traffic Generator
The Market Opportunity:
Test Gear is VERY expensive and complex (100’s of K$)
Shared central resource in contention for use by engineering/QA/FAE/Support
Engineering developers wait in queue to test when code is complete, often too late.
The complexity is rarely used to test application software

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Argon Blaster – The Cost Effective Solution
A high performance network traffic generator
Argon software using Netronome NFE card
Cost effective tool for Eng/QA/Support
Supports 10Gbps line rate
Can generate millions of unique flows
Maintains inter-packet timing
NFE-3240 card
Full size PCIe gen 2 x8 card
2 x 10Gbps fibre interfaces
4GB of DDR3 memory
NFP-3240 flow processor

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Argon Streams is a set of reference bit streams available in variants for HEVC and VP9 video CODEC standards. It provides a formal verification technique allowing designers to achieve full test coverage for their decoder.
Argon Streams

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Argon Streams – benefits
HEVC/H.265
Only set of bit-streams providing full coverage
Formal verification of every equation in the specification
Find all errors in your decoder design with our rigorous test suite
Go to production with complete confidence that your decoder is correct
Full interactive coverage reporting
10 times faster simulation than reference test bit-streams
Used by leading tier-1 IP and semiconductor companies
VP9
Only set of bit-streams providing full coverage
Formal verification against the VP9 reference code
Find all errors in your decoder design with our rigorous test suite
Reduce simulation time without sacrificing test coverage
Reduce risk for your video decoder chip design
Go to production with complete confidence that your decoder is correct
Full interactive coverage reporting
Shorter simulation times than other test bit-streams
Used by leading tier-1 IP and semiconductor companies

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And we are involved in an emerging technology…

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Weightless – A new solution for M2M connectivity
An exciting technology for M2M connectivity, enabling connectivity where other technology currently fails.
UHF spectrum penetrates buildings, allowing 5km range indoors, 10km outdoors
Low power consumption means >10 year battery life for standalone devices
No network or licensing charges
Low cost devices (~$8 for connectivity)
Secure and guaranteed message delivery
Up to 1k, connected devices on a single private base station
100k’s on a national base station
Global standard

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Argon is excellently positioned to develop technology for Weightless applications
Developed the first demonstration application for Weightless
Developed Neul’s Weightless basestation hardware
Excellent track record in M2M product development
Argon’s role in Weightless development

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How can we help?
cliff.dive@argondesign.com
+44 1223 422355
www.argondesign.com
https://twitter.com/Argon_Design
http://www.linkedin.com/company/511683
“Thinking inside the box”