New Start-Up Tachyum in Nanometer-Class Chips and Systems They Power

Silicon Valley start-up Tachyum Inc. just launched, is announcing its mission to conquer the performance plateau in nm-class chips and the systems they power.

Based on new proprietary computational mechanisms, created specifically to unlock the performance of nm-size devices, the company will deliver solutions with speed, power, and cost to solve the most complex problems in the cloud, big data, deep learning, mobile devices, autonomous systems, and large-scale computing. The impact of Tachyum products will be felt across a spectrum of applications and markets.

Tachyum was co-founded by Dr. Radoslav ‘Rado’ Danilak, who has spent more than 25 years designing processing systems and delivering technically inspired, economically significant products to market. Holding more than 100 patents, he pioneered enterprise and consumer MLC flash adoption, with a flash memory controller that increased flash endurance (limited by device physics) by 10X. He was founder and CEO of Skyera, a supplier of ultra-dense solid-state storage systems, acquired by WD in 2014. At Wave Computing, he architected the 10GHz Processing Element of their deep learning DPU. He was co-founder and CTO of SandForce, acquired by LSI in 2011 for $377 million; a chipset and GPU architect at nVidia; a CPU architect at Nishan Systems and Toshiba; and chief architect of 64b x86 CPU at Gizmo Tech.

“We have entered a post-Moore’s Law era where performance hit a plateau, cost reduction slowed dramatically, and process node shrinks and CPU release cycles are getting longer,” said Danilak, Tachyum CEO. “An innovative new approach, from first principles is the only realistic chance we have of achieving performance improvements to rival those that powered the tech industry of past decades, and the opportunity is a hundred times greater than any venture I’ve been involved in.”

Tachyum is also cofounded by Ken Wagner, with more than 25 years of relevant experience: He was a co-founder of machine learning company Wave Computing, chip synthesis tools company Silicon Analytics, and Theseus Logic, a clock-less logic company that invented patented Null Convention Logic (NCL).

As VP of software engineering, co-founder Igor Shevlyakov brings more than 20 years of compiler experience to Tachyum as a core competency. At Skyera he led the performance aspects of the flash-translation layer, and led compiler and system tools development at MicroUnity, which designed BroadMX CPU and licensed its innovations in SIMD processing to microprocessor industry leaders. Before that, he was part of WindRiver‘s GCC compiler and GNU toolchain team, working on code generation for several processor architectures. As one of the founders of Excelsior‘s JET, he spearheaded the development of the AOT Java compiler.

Co-founder and chief hardware architect Rod Mullendore brings hardware skills to Tachyum, along with his 30 years’ experience designing complex storage and networking chips and systems. He architected and implemented ASIC and FPGA-based flash controllers at Skyera. He was chief architect for the flash controller chips at SandForce, and he was a member of the founding team of Nishan Systems, which developed storage over IP adapted for the IETF iFCP RFC4172.

About Tachyum
Named for the Greek “tachy,” meaning speed, combined with “-um,” indicating an element, Tachyum emerged from stealth mode in 2017 dedicated to engineering disruptive intelligent information processing products. The Campbell, CA-based company received seed funding in 2016.