| | assuring a fully production-ready part, we have taken the time to get it right, and we are highly confident we have achieved that.
Our Marketing organization, under the direction of Sean Riley, is actively engaged in building awareness of our new technology and presenting the FPOA to the industry through presentations at conferences and in technical publications. By the end of 2006, we expect that many industry analysts will recognize the FPOA as a new programmable logic alternative.
We finished the quarter ended December 31, 2005 with twelve design wins. The Company defines design wins as customers who have purchased an FPOA development board and tools. While we don’t expect all design wins will turn into production revenue, we are focused on developing long-term relationships with our customers. Initial wins are with customers that require the high performance of the FPOA, making them more willing to adopt a new architecture. We believe that once these customers achieve a new performance level and competitive advantage, they will have a greater incentive to award us additional design wins. Our team is focused on our customer’s success with these initial wins.
Our new VP of Worldwide Sales, Glen Wiley, started in early January. He brings with him many years experience in the semiconductor industry, most notably building sales organizations to drive rapid growth. We are well on our way to establishing an organization consisting of direct Area Sales Managers, or ASM; Field Application Engineers, or FAE; and independent manufacturers’ representatives. The manufacturers’ rep model will enable us to maximize the exposure of the FPOA in our targeted commercial markets while minimizing cash burn. Our FAEs and ASMs will help close the opportunities the manufacturers’ reps identify. We are pleased to announce that, as of February 28th, four manufacturers’ reps have committed to carry the MathStar FPOA in their product offering. We are getting very positive traction in our target markets — machine vision, professional video and test and measurement. In order to accelerate the design win ramp, we plan on adding manufacturers’ reps in all major North American markets by the middle of this year.
We believe we are on track to close a minimum of 25 design wins during 2006. Our marketing and sales strategies have produced a strong pipeline of potential customers at various levels of commitment. We will provide updates on our progress at the end of each quarter.Due to a number of factors, not the least of which is the availability of production silicon, we expect a significant number of those design wins to occur in the latter |