EXOTIC SILICON
“Research into high-end business computing”
An introduction for new visitors
This is our research website.
Here you will find technical articles, programming tutorials, research papers, and other similar material.
For commercial services from Exotic Silicon, please visit www.exoticsilicon.com.
Working in researchIt's so much more fun!
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Exotic Silicon history
Drawing on over three decades of experience in the IT industry, Exotic Silicon was founded in 2016 as a privately funded research organisation.
The culmination of various diverse ventures, Exotic Silicon was established to provide a unified platform for our groundbreaking research going forward.
Whilst IT research remains our primary focus, we now offer executive high-end commercial IT services to organisations with unique problems to solve.
“We developed webpages in the 1990s, wrote CGI programs in Perl, and created WAP sites at the dawn of 3G...”
Exotic Silicon today
Networking in a pure IPv6 environment
BSD systems on RISC-V hardware
In-house custom software development
Security auditing
VoIP and next generation internet communications
Interoperability through open standards
Enterprise applications on SBC clusters
Alternative operating systems for mobile devices
Replacements for x86 in datacenter applications
Convergence computing
Off-line and network-unconnected devices
Bandwidth constrained remote locations
Internationalization
Replacement control software for consumer electronics
... and much more besides!
Animate background
Exotic
To us, the best selling equipment of today - that new smart­phone you have in your pocket, or the smart TV in your living room - look as primative as a home computer from the 1980s.
The current ‘state of the art’ is far behind where it could be. Hyped-up, glitzy-looking superficial products that are full of promise, but run ancient and buggy software inside. We work to change that, by demonstrating high-quality innovative ideas and raising the bar for standards across the IT industry.
Here at Exotic Silicon we take a disparate view of business IT, looking at things from angles that others ignore, and investigating aspects of IT that other people don't. We use the unusual features. We configure stuff in non-standard ways. We write our own custom software stacks, and we use equipment for applications that it wasn't intended for. We push today's technology in directions it wasn't necessarily intended to be pushed.
All this leads us not only towards finding and fixing bugs in open source software, including some that nobody else has fixed for a decade, but also into discovering everything from firmware bugs in consumer equipment such as air conditioners and washing machines, to quality control issues at a large medical laboratory.
Maintaining high standards of technical quality is always on our agenda. Our work is created from the ground up with many years of experience and real programming know-how. We don't reach out for software that somebody else wrote, when we have the option to create something better in-house.
As a result, we also have a large body of knowledge of older systems, many of which have now gone full-circle and fallen into disuse, technology that has been abandoned and forgotten. We occasionally do projects involving those, especially when nobody else seems to remember how they worked. Our knowledge-base includes legacy programming languages such as Fortran, data conversion from obscure file formats, and even assembly language coding on various platforms.
In summary: The expertise we’ve built up during many years of dedication to the IT industry now allows us to be creative and try new ideas at only a fraction of the cost, in terms of time and computing resources, that others might require. And that's precisely what we do!
Most of the technology that's all around us now, was once only in the realm of enthusiasts, and trend-setters.
A lot of our work today at Exotic Silicon still is.
Become part of that trend-setting group.