The unforgettable President and Chief Executive Officer of 3dfx, Mr. Alex Leupp, who lost the battle against NVIDIA in 2000, is obviously about to be involved in another one with the same Santa Clara, California-based company headed by the same CEO Mr. Jen-Hsun Huang.

As we noted in our news-story about ex-3dfx executives (published on the 13^th of June, 2003), Alex Leupp now serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer of a startup called Atsana Semiconductor located in Ottawa, Canada and founded in 1999. The company develops processors to be used in wireless phones, PDAs and PC/network cameras.

Last week NVIDIA announced acquisition of MediaQ, a well-known provider of logic for feature-rich multimedia-capable handhelds. Basically, Atsana and MediaQ target the same market segments of rich-media wireless applications, as a result, they may be considered as rivals! 

The obvious difference between Atsana Semiconductor and MediaQ is that MediaQ has been pretty successful and pretty well-known among providers of mobile devices, whereas Atsana is just another young startup that is offering just a single product.

Presently Atsana is providing the J2210 media processor that offers a powerful and cost-efficient media processing solution for wireless devices. Atsana’s J2210 incorporates massively parallel array processor technology with an embedded ARM9 RISC processor delivers video, image, audio and voice encoding and decoding with superior power efficiencies. The processor is fully programmable, allowing it to support a variety of applications and compression algorithms including MPEG4, JPEG, MJPEG, Vocoders such as CELP, AMR and G.723.1, as well as evolving video standards such as H.26L and JPEG2000.

So far there have been no design wins for Atsana Semiconductor, but provided that their technologies are efficient enough, they may even compete with ATI Technologies or NVIDIA (MediaQ) in certain market segments eventually. Of course, in case Atsana is not acquired by its competitors first…