Update on status of IntellaSys and SEAforth
Greg Bailey
IntellaSys existed and remained a viable source of SEAforth chips. This was
the truth at that time. Conditions have changed and I feel that I have a
duty to correct the record for the benefit of everyone who read my prior
posting, particularly if any of those people are making plans for use of
chips provided by IntellaSys.
Originally, when on 15 January 2009 TPL effectively disbanded IntellaSys by
laying off the entire SEAForth team, consisting of Chet Brown, YP Cheng,
Greg Bailey, Lily Ronningen, Debbie Davis, Dylan Smeder, Mark Smeder, Skip
Inskeep, Steven Hsu, Dean Sanderson, Doug Dillon, Jeff Fox, Charley
Shattuck, Jack Ou, Dave Yetter, Rob Chapman, Mario Nigrovic, and Glenn
Sanderson, along with our consultants, including John Rible, Bill Muench,
Leon Wagner, Elizabeth Rather, and Warren Sarkison (Chuck Moore is not and
has never been an employee or contractor to TPL; indeed, TPL is supposed to
be working for *him*), retaining only Michael Montvelishsky with our
blessing, we believed that we were negotiating in good faith with TPL to
spin IntellaSys off as an independent company and so felt perfectly honest
in continuing to do what we could to maintain the credibility of the brand
and the chips by communicating with interested parties in cooperation with
TPL.
As time passed it became increasingly clear that we would not get an
agreement from TPL that any reasonable person would sign nor that anyone
with good sense would be willling to invest in; accordingly, we have formed
an independent company, GreenArrays, Inc., set up our own offices, and have
been making our own chips while seeking funding. The entire team named
above has hung together without pay for eight months, hoping to make a
viable chip company of GreenArrays. It does not seem likely any longer that
we will ever spin IntellaSys or the SEAForth chips out as such, and so it is
no longer honorable for us to assist TPL in maintaining the credibility of
IntellaSys as a company or SEAForth chips made by IntellaSys as a product
beyond what the present truth supports.
IntellaSys still exists but, to the best of my knowledge, it is an empty
shell. The IntellaSys website contains false and misleading information
about the status of the company and of the people who worked for it through
2008. Since we were concerned after reading posts on the forum of Patriot
Scientific stockholders that we could, perhaps, be accused of passively
aiding and abetting a fraud, TPL was asked in August to correct this. They
did so in my case, but the depiction of Chet, Chuck and YP as officers of
IntellaSys and/or TPL has not as of today been corrected and so remains
false and misleading. We have been told that action on Chet, Chuck and YP's
lawful requests has been delayed for nearly a month while Dan Leckrone, whom
I understand to be the sole owner with absolute personal control over TPL
and all of its subsidiaries, sought legal advice; one wonders why a lawyer
would need legal advice before complying with requests to stop misleading
the public by falsely depicting those making the requests as officers of his
company, rather than immediately complying with those requests.
The truth, to the best of my knowledge, is as follows: None of the
portrayed officers except Michael works at TPL (I do not know about Michael
Connors but he had basically nothing to do with SEAForth in the first
place); no one competent to design or modify a SEAForth chip works there; no
one competent to correct any of the usage rules applicable to the S40-7j
works there (and we have learned of additional usage rules during this
year); no one competent to completely test the S40's that TPL does have in
hand works there, and the stock of perhaps 15,000 chips in hand at TPL is
almost all untested; the 20 wafers that were in the hands of the packaging
houses have been there for going on a year and may well be contaminated, and
as far as I am aware TPL has not paid the packaging houses for work done in
2008 so by now those wafers may already have been destroyed; the production
masks are now nearly a year old and the end of their useful life is not far
away. As far as I know only one person (Michael) on the TPL payroll is
competent to program the SEAForth chips, aided by two of his friends in
Russia who help out as contractors. According to the TPL website, Michael
has been programming a very good hearing aid for TPL.
This might be enough for TPL to claim that it is not a "patent troll" but it
is not in my opinion enough to be a reliable source of the chips and
technology we developed there before Dan Leckrone ignored Chuck's objections
and dissolved both IntellaSys and the SEAForth team.
I encourage anyone who might be interested in using chips designed by Chuck
and crew to contact GreenArrays, Inc. at http://www.greenarraychips.com and
anyone who wishes to root for Chuck in his quest for justice from TPL to
read his blogs at http://www.colorforth.com
Mux
Hope things will work out! When can we expect GA hardware / devkits?
-Mux
Greg Bailey
"Mux" <yvo....@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:964d8d55-636d-4924...@f20g2000prn.googlegroups.com...
Hope things will work out! When can we expect GA hardware / devkits?
-Mux
The four chips we've run so far (GA32, GA32 with 5v I/O, GA40 in 130nm) all
had one node replaced with test circuits and nonstandard pinouts for access
to them. We used socketed boards to test these due to limited funds. The
initial run of GA4 was committed to a handful of pretty rudimentary boards.
We can work with all these chips using the colorForth IDE but to talk to the
GA4 you need additional RS232 to 1.8v serial board; there are barely enough
of these to go around for own folks. Again we have had to conserve funds
and concentrate their use on shuttle runs and testing.
Presently we have a clean GA144 (no test circuits) cooking, along with the
second cut of the GA4. The 144 is intended to be a preproduction tapeout
and the GA4 should be in pretty good shape. We will have to put them both
on minimal cheap boards and as soon as we have funds enough those should
become available in very limited quantities with interface hardware ... we
only get 35 to 45 big chips out of a shuttle run, something more like 260 to
280 of the little chips. Ultimate eval board for the 144's will be much
like Haypress Creek, possibly with a couple GA4's added; one price for just
our chips, another price if SDRAM is added. colorForth for the interactive,
integrated development environment, a separate version for each chip with
the correct geometry, ROM code, and softsim (instruction level simulator);
we are working on the colorForth release for GA4, 32, 144 in that form and
anyone interested will be able to write and test code in simulation as soon
as they have it. You will be pleased to learn that the onerous EULA that
TPL tacked onto VentureForth for the S40 is patently lacking from
colorForth. We will probably post the colorForth IDE configured for S40 as
well, so that anyone with those or planning to build things from them can
write code without worrying about someone else having rights to it. The S40
chips do work and if you can get a bunch of them and build something that
makes money from them, knock yourself out.
These are all tentative plans and depending on whether, how, and when we
come by some funds things could change, but at present I'd say we ought to
be in a position to sample very limited quantities some time after we get
the current shuttle runs back in November, with general availability of
chips and eval boards having to wait till we are ready, and can afford, to
make production masks and an engineering lot of wafers. I estimate that if
the money comes pretty soon we will have lost a little more than a year in
getting back to the production readiness we had last January, but with
better chips.
It will be a little longer before we're in a position to actively inundate
the website with all this stuff, and I'd rather we be announcing things
there, so please be patient but do pay attention to
http://www.colorforth.com for developments :)
And if anyone has a million or two dollars lying around wasting away at a
rate of return less than inflation, things could change pretty dramatically
for the better.
Take care, wish you well, and I will now take my leave of clf for awhile
again :)
- Greg
Albert van der Horst
Greg Bailey <gr...@GreenArrayChips.com> wrote:
< SNIP some news about Green Arrays >
>
>And if anyone has a million or two dollars lying around wasting away at a
>rate of return less than inflation, things could change pretty dramatically
>for the better.
I have not, but the Dutch Forth chapter has some contacts with
Elektor. This started in the Netherlands, but it now is one of the
leading European Electronics magazines, sporting a circuit board
service. For example it sells a small development board of Renesas,
ready to program, in cooperation with Glyn, a German distributor
of Renesas. Its price (euro 30) is in a range that lots of
interested amateurs can buy it.
I would love to see a small application example of Green Array
and have it promoted all over Europe through this channel.
That should be sufficient to attract an investor.
Did you consider going public with 2000 shares of 1000 dollars?
Emission could be a success, but unfriendly take overs is a
problem.
>
>- Greg
>
Groetjes Albert
--
--
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters.
albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst
Wayne
wrote:
> Some months back, I posted a message to this group indicating that
> IntellaSys existed and remained a viable source of SEAforth chips. This
[cut]
All I can say is, oh no, not again. I wish Chuck the best in his
endeavors to get back into the market. It is such a shame that billions
of dollars of improvement to the world economy that his technology could
have made, has been widdled away repeatedly over the years by the things
that have happened to Chuck's endeavors. We should have had much of the
infrastructure of the world based on Forth stacks by now, we would have
had significant savings on the environmental grid as well, but few people
recognize a practical good idea when they see it enough to put away the
very short term dollars they are after. I see these concepts as valuable
to society, after all, if forth related structures were as efficient as C
structures, and C structures were as efficient as forth related
structures, I would probably be there than here.
Many thanks
Wayne.
Wayne
wrote:
> Presently we have a clean GA144 (no test circuits) cooking, along with
Sounds nice.
> The S40 chips do work and if you can get a bunch of them and build
> something that makes money from them, knock yourself out.
Good to know that people are listening. With seaforth, there was always
the strange sense that this was not necessarily so. Especially when
development boards turned into $499, that would have cut 90%+ of potential
development outside the inner community and large corporations. I might
consider somethings that people are up to with the chips naive, but they
are here and many will undoubtedly work through them to the next project.
I had previously suggested an user developed open-source code base to
promote application development (which helps with project viability
potentially prolonging availability for the rest of us) and programmable
circuit versions for when it is no longer available (and if programmable
circuits eventually drop to near custom circuit performance and power
levels, the technologies used being the present limitations). But there
is no large funding source available (if there even ahd been) for
competition prizes for open source applications, open source seeding
application development, let alone spin off programmable circuit design),
so user supported Open source is the only viable option left.
I much appreciate greenarray's tentative support for community
involvement. It is the only way most of us can be an active part in
Chuck's dream. However, some simplified, but sexy, options additions
might also be appreciated (1 cycle transfer of words in the array, full
sram memory port for 1 transistor pseudo sram (well at least the
www.spmt.com serial port memory technology eventually (which is similar in
concept, though more complex, to what I was advocating a year or two ago)
and some performance orientated multiplication/matrix maths). When 1+
transistor dram comes out, we are talking about the possibility of much of
sram in sram packaging being replaced
with this cheaper alternative, and sram is the main domain for low powered
electronics instead of sdram.
Groetjes Albert's Elektor suggestion is good. I also was looking into a
hobbyist board based on the SEA development board through a local
magazine, we have had a history of computer kits in our magazines over
here too. This sort of scheme can be applied in conjunction with major
magazine in different markets. So a magazine in each market gets rights
from that market and prints articles to this new, strange, erotic,
experimental processing system (selling/recruitment points). If they
sell, write and support well, and want to put their support in, they get
it. Still, if somebody makes an forth based OpenCL based on a general
purpose GPU, you might be in trouble (especially low powered general
purpose GPU's based on Imagination technologies designs) due to the GPU's
market familiarity and those interested in ultimate performance over power
consumption and cost.
Thanks, all the best.
Wayne.
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