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.