Lyric Semiconductor currently employs 30 people and received more than $20m of government and investment funding for a probability processing technology that calculates in a completely new way, enabling orders-of-magnitude improvement in processor efficiency.

Lyric Error Correction for flash memory, the first commercial application of probability processing, offers a 30X reduction in die size and a 12X improvement in power consumption, all at higher throughput compared to today’s digital solutions.

Lyric has developed an alternative to digital computing redesigning processing circuits from the ground up to natively process probabilities – from gate circuits to processor architecture to programming language. Many applications that require a thousand conventional processors will soon run on just 1 Lyric processor, providing 1,000X efficiencies in cost, power, and size.

Lyric has developed a new kind of logic gate circuit using transistors as dimmer switches rather than on/off switches. Circuits can accept inputs and calculate outputs that are between 0 and 1, directly representing the probabilities - or levels of certainty.

A digital processor steps through these operations serially in order to perform a function. In order to improve efficiency even further, Lyric’s processors are designed to perform many probability computations in parallel.

“After a decade of development, we have no shortage of opportunities for our probability processing technology, but we are currently focused on a modest list of both short and long-term applications that will see enormous gains in performance,” says Lyric Semi CEO, co-founder Ben Vigoda (left) who teamed with 25 year semiconductor veteran (right) Dave Reynolds.



“We are starting with Lyric Error Correction but ultimately plan to develop a more general purpose probability processor that will truly change the landscape for many applications.”

The products to date are Lyric Error Correction for Flash memory and work on the GP5 a general purpose programmable probability processing platform.

Design engineer job of a lifetime

The searched for senior design engineer at Lyric will work closely with one of Lyric's very highly experienced design engineers as well as with Lyric’s applied math group to create a new paradigm in computation. As your design team grows, you will have the opportunity to take an increasing leadership role in your team and in the company.

The primary responsibility will be to help design analog and mixed-signal circuit blocks, participating in architectural decisions and design reviews, responsible for IC simulation and transistor-level design of analog blocks, responsible for design, simulation, verification, physical design, bench testing, and support of IC test.

Among the minimum qualifications are "enjoying tinkering, taking things apart and making things work," as well as "the ability to ask good questions!"

Competencies include Cadence tools, modelling with verilogAMS experience of MATLAB simulation, Java, Python, Perl or similar, experience working in a start-up environment and US citizenship or Visa