Newfound Technology acquires Shearwater Technology

APRIL 2--Newfound Technology Corp. (Littleton, MA;www.newfoundtech.com) has acquired Shearwater Technology (Littleton, MA; www.sherwatertech.com). Newfound has purchased the proprietary rights to numerous embedded product lines, including Ariel's high-speed imaging products, as well as the assumption of strategic manufacturing relationships with New England-based technology firms. Key employees, including Joseph Rogers, former president of Shearwater, have joined Newfound.

In a related development, Shearwater Technology and Vision Components GmbH (Karlsruhe, Germany;www.vision-components.de) announced a strategic partnership to increase penetration of Vision Components smart cameras into the North American market. Under terms of the agreement Shearwater Technology will act as a stocking distributor providing sales, technical support, training, and service. Shearwater has served the machine-vision marketplace for the last 18 months with the Griffin product line of C80-based application accelerators.

In another dvelopment, Ariel Corp. (Cranbury, NJ;www.ariel.com), a supplier of open systems remote access products, is selling its image-processing technology to Shearwater Technology. The two companies have signed a letter of intent by which Shearwater will license all of the business, assets, and intellectual property associated with Ariel's PCI-based Griffin product line. Terms of the sale were not disclosed, but Ariel will continue to receive royalties from future sales of all Griffin products.

Griffin is a PCI-bus image-processing plug-in board based on Texas Instruments' TMS32OC8O parallel digital-signal processor. It runs under the Microsoft Windows NT operating system and is used in a variety of image-processing and machine-vision applications, including automated inspection, image recognition, image enhancement and rendering, and computer-based surveillance.