Embedded Performance sets Biomation purchase

Electronic News, April 11, 1994

SANTA CLARA, CALIF.--

Embedded Performance, Inc. (EPI), signed a letter of intent to acquire Biomation Corp., a manufacturer of logic analyzers and other instruments. The acquisition is contingent upon the closing of a substantial equity investment in EPI by an undisclosed investor.

Norbert I, aengrich, EPI's president and CEO, said the equity investment "will give us the working capital necessary to aggressively pursue the rapidly expanding embedded RISC market."

The stock-swap deal must be approved by the shareholders of both companies, which are privately held. Financial terms were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of this month.

Under the corporate banner of Gould, lnc., Biomation was one of the leading vendors of logic analyzers in the 1980s. The company was rounded in 1968 to develop medical electronics, but found test and measurement a more lucrative field.

As the market for logic analyzers became more specialized, Gould four years ago sold the company to Toyo Corp. of Japan. A year later, Toyo acquired another American T&M vendor, Outlook Technology, and consolidated it with Biomation (EN, July 8, 1991 ).

Founded in 1987, EPI supplies software and hardware tools for engineers using RISC microprocessors in embedded applications. The company's software development toolkits include cross'compilers, macro-assemblers, high-speed linkers, instruction-set simulators, realtime operating system kernels, source-level and symbolic-level debuggers and alebug kernels.

EPI's in-circuit emulators provide code profiling, code coverage and branch coverage capabilities. EPI presently supports the 29000 family of processors and microcontrollers from Advanced Micro Devices, the MIPS RBxxx processors from Integrated Device Technology and the Sparc 32-bit processors.

Fred Viles, EPI's chief technical officer, said: "Access to the gigahertz technology at Biomation will position EPI to be out front in its real-time emulation support of future high-speed RISC microprocessors. In addition, we expect to integrate the Biomation logic analyzers with our software and debugger technology to create new tightly coupled debug solutions for the embedded software engineer."

Added Mr. Laengrich: "Although this acquisition will substantially increase EPI's revenues, we expect it to increase our number of employees by approximately 20 percent, mostly in engineering and marketing. This will yield improved profit levels on both EPI and Biomation product lines and allow us to further expand our product development and customer support."

EPI presently has 45 employees, and it expects to hire eight to 10 of Biomation's 25 employees.

The logic analyzer market "has changed fairly dramatically" since the 1980s, with the emphasis shifting to software debugging from hardware debugging, Mr. Laengrich said. "The need for extensive hardware debugging has decreased, primarily due to ASIC technology. The debugging has been done during simulation and AS1C verification."

Software debugging has also changed in the past decade, as the source code is more likely to be in the C or Ada languages, rather than the assembly code common in the 8-bit era.