LONDON — Silistix Ltd., a spinoff from the asynchronous logic research group at the University of Manchester in England, has appointed Ian Barton as managing director of Silistix UK Ltd., its U.K. engineering subsidiary.

The company has been organized with Silistix Ltd. as the top-level holding company that owns Silistix Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), which represents the operational side covering sales and marketing and Silistix UK Ltd. (Manchester, England) containing the engineering and R&D side of the company, said David Fritz, chief executive officer.

Silistix markets its asynchronous logic expertise in the form of Chainworks and ChainArchitect EDA tools for designing and analyzing globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) chips and systems.

Barton will manage the operations of Silistix’s development facility in Manchester. Prior to accepting the appointment as managing director Barton managed design facilities for complex devices across multiple sites at Zetex Semiconductors and Motorola Ltd. Barton has worked on FPGA architectures, DSPs and ASICs targeted at such markets as networking and mobile communications, Silistix said.

“Silistix’s self-timed interconnect solutions solve a set of obvious chip design problems,” notes "My experience leading a multi-site team designing very large system-on-chip solutions for mobile basestation applications proved that achieving final timing closure with traditional clock-based synchronous interconnect could literally take months, even with state-of-the-art timing-driven tools. The Silistix solution eliminates that time-consuming and expensive headache," said Barton, in a statement issued by Silistix.

David Fritz, Silistix CEO, said Barton's experience in managing geographically diverse design teams would be critical as Silistix expands its engineering and customer support operations.

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