CEO Interview: Dr. Nikos Zervas of CAST

Dr. Nikos Zervas joined CAST company in 2010, having previously served as VP of Marketing and Engineering and as COO. Prior to working at CAST, Nikos co-founded Alma Technologies and served as its Chairman and CEO for nine years.  Under his leadership Alma Technologies bootstrapped to become a reputable IP provider, developing cutting-edge image and video compression cores and solutions. His research has been published in over 40 technical journal and conference papers, and he has been honored by the IEEE Computer Society with a Low-Power Design Contest award. Nikos served on the board of the Hellenic Semiconductor Industry Association from 2009 until 2013, where he was responsible for strategic planning.

Tell us about your company?
CAST provides IP cores that save time and money for electronic system developers across a wide range of industry segments and application areas.
Our current product line includes processors, compression, interfaces, peripherals, and security, and features industry-leading cores for automotive, industrial, defense, data centers, and other application areas. We focus on providing a better IP experience with every core, meaning high-quality products that are easy to use, backed by market-leading technical support, and available with simple, cost-effective licensing, including royalty-free terms.

CAST was established in 1993 and has helped to pioneer and shape today’s booming IP industry. The company is private and always internally held. This strategic avoidance of external investors or debt of any kind has given us the freedom to grow organically and focus on solving real customer problems rather than being driven primarily by the financial expectations of venture capitalists or the demands of shareholders.

CAST is a global company, with headquarters in New Jersey; staff in San Diego, Austin, and other US locations; offices in the Czech Republic, Italy, Greece, and Poland; and partners throughout Asia. We’ve sold thousands of products to hundreds of customers, with a repeat sales rate of over 50%. These customers range from established tier-1 firms to emerging start-ups, and together they are shipping millions of product units using IP from CAST.

We employ a novel and highly successful approach to developing IP products: our own engineering team develops many CAST IP cores, and we also work with tightly coupled partners who have outstanding technical experience in particular areas. We enforce the same stringent quality standards on every core that CAST offers and we provide front-line support for them all, so customers can get the most advanced IP technology available but work with a provably reliable and trustworthy provider. And for our development partners, it gives their engineering talent access to otherwise unapproachable markets and the advantages of what we believe is the industry‘s most experienced IP sales and marketing team.

What problems are you solving?
We strive to deliver the true promise of reusable IP cores across our whole product line. That is to help design groups complete SoCs in the shorter periods of time demanded by market conditions even though these designers may lack detailed personal knowledge of every piece of technology they must use to develop competitive and successful products. For example, a developer can reliably build a system around a functional safety RISC-V processor core from CAST without actually knowing how to design a processor or achieve functional safety status.

CAST enables SoC developers to focus on where they really excel. We provide them with effective, reliable IP cores that they can use to build their systems, we bundle these products with class-leading support should the developer need it during integration, and we offer all that with fair terms that work well for both parties. Our customers have peace of mind knowing that every IP core they get from CAST is going to do the job it’s supposed to do in an efficient way, without causing any trouble. Customers can thus bring products to market in 18 months or so rather than the decade it might take without IP cores.

What application areas are your strongest?
We’re proud to offer a product line that’s both broad and deep, including several stand-out IP cores for different application areas.

The Automotive market is racing along and we offer cores for interfaces—with CAN and TSN leadership—plus processors and compression, most enabling functional safety with ASIL-D readiness.

Aerospace and Defense contractors especially value our efficient networking stacks for communication and compression cores. Both the Mars Curiosity rover and the Hubble space telescope employ image compression IP licensed from CAST, and there are many more like those we cannot talk about.

Industrial Automation developers use our 32- and 8-bit microcontrollers (the 8051 still lives!), networking stacks and interface cores. TSN is hot in this market and interest in and single-pair Ethernet is growing rapidly.

Data Centers take advantage of our hardware compression engines to optimize storage and bandwidth, as well as our encryption and TCP/UDP/IP accelerators to keep up with today’s staggering networking speeds without throttling their CPUs.

Wearables and Internet of Things systems take advantage of our ultra-low power embedded processors, peripheral-subsystems, compression, and interfaces.

CAST customers typically demand confidentially to preserve their competitive advantage so we can’t really talk about who has fielded which products. But it’s true that IP from CAST is probably closer to every reader of this interview than they might realize:

• Your smartphone and smartwatch are more likely using some CAST IP,
• Your cloud data is physically stored in data centers that probably use our compression and networking stacks,
• The sensors, ECUs, braking and other systems in your car are most likely communicating over IP from CAST,
• The security cameras in your local airport (or even in your house) could be using compression from CAST, and
• That Mars or space wallpaper photo on your computer has probably been compressed with IP CAST provided.

What keeps your customers up at night?
CAST customers have no shortage of stress factors, but with respect to IP their greatest fear is experiencing immense delays or even entire re-spins because of bad IP. We address this natural fear in several ways.

First, we enforce experience-based standards for reusability and quality on every core, from its high-level architecture down to its coding, documentation, and packaging.

Second, we don’t cut corners, especially as far as verification is concerned. We never treat a core’s first customers as beta testers, and we have learned that getting a new core to market quicker is not worth customers getting their product to market later.

And third, we invest in a support infrastructure ensuring that the questions or issues customers inevitably may have are resolved with speed and satisfaction.

The latter, technical support responsiveness, can be a real frustration point for many IP core users, who sometimes wait days or weeks for a response to their urgent queries. Instead, at CAST we have a 24/7 support mentality and coverage network and have the actual IP developers available to assist. Our average first response time is currently under 24 hours, and our resolution time is less than three days. This is how we demonstrate respect to our customers.

What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
While the dozens—hundreds?—of “IP core companies” that once existed has been reduced through failure or acquisition, those who have thrived like CAST have either focused on technical niches where they shine or learned to compete with price, perceived product quality, comprehensive services, or some combination.

At CAST, we don’t tend to worry about particular competitors but instead focus on providing A Better IP Experience for IP customers. This means reducing risk by providing proven, high-quality IP products backed by fast, effective technical support and available with fair, flexible, and typically royalty-free licensing.

While we have a strong—and growing—engineering group within CAST, our model of close, long-term partnerships with select domain experts enables us to offer a product line that we believe is uniquely both broad and deep.

Ranging from commodity cores through leading-edge functions, developers can find—and trust—many of the cores they need in the CAST product line. We provide the reliability, stability, and services of a large corporate IP provider but with agility and relationship-building more akin to a start-up.

Another competitive advantage CAST offers is less tangible but equally important. Despite being geographically widespread, we work hard to build a close, strong team, treating every employee, partner, and customer with respect and integrity. While some days are certainly challenging, the CAST team overall enjoys their work and shares in the company mission, and this attitude very positively impacts the world in which we operate.

What new features/technology are you working on?
We don’t usually launch or even promote products until they are fully verified, packaged, and ready for immediate successful use. But I can share a few things just for your readers.

Soon we’ll introduce 100G and 400G TCP/UDP/IP hardware stack that we think will be the first to support both IPv4 and IPv6.

We’re also enhancing our offerings in the area of TSN Ethernet—in collaboration with our partner at Fraunhofer IPMS—with 10G cores that better address the needs of industrial automation, automotive, and aerospace system developers.

Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) is another hot area these days, and you’ll soon see us collaborating with other members of the SPE Alliance to showcase some exciting products.

Yet another area of focus for CAST is that of embedded processors, their peripherals, subsystems, and security. Adding more new RISC-V cores with improved security features and better performance is on our roadmap for this year, as well as a series of security function accelerators and peripherals.

How do customers normally engage with your company?
More than 50% of new sales are to repeat customers, who will just call or email us directly.

We do regular outreach at events, with editorial placements, IP portals, select advertising, and social media, but most new customers find us through our website, which we first launched in 1994.

Our commitment to saving SoC developers considerable time begins with their first contact with CAST online. We freely post a considerable amount of technical information about every core, which helps the developer determine if a particular core may be right for them, even before they contact us.

Once they do contact us, our team of experienced sales engineers and global representatives are ready to help them choose the best IP for their exact needs. Eventual system success begins with choosing the right IP cores, and we never propose a non-optimum solution just to close a sale.

Sometimes the potential customer is exploring a technical area in which they lack personal experience—automotive ASIL D certification, for example—and our team has the know-how and aptitude to help them understand and work through the best fit for their needs.

Our Better IP Experience philosophy thus extends from our first interaction with a potential customer through their successful production and shipping of products employing IP cores from CAST. We believe that this approach—as well as our product line—sets CAST apart as one of the best IP partners a SoC or FPGA developer might find.

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