Think Silicon

Think Silicon S.A. is a privately held IP (Intellectual Property) technology company founded in 2007 and based in Patras (Greece). The company specializes in designing extreme small, ultra-low power, high-performance 2D & 3D graphics (GPU), video (ISP) and display (DP) microprocessor cores. End-products built using this technology are wearables, and embedded devices with small displays and/or camera-lenses, such as smart/fitness/multi-sport watches, cameras, medical devices, AR/VR glasses, home control systems, home appliances, drones, industrial and any display controlled systems.

IP Products

• NEMA®|pico - the smallest member (single-core, 0.07mm²) of the NEMA®-GPU Series, brings “smartphone-like” 2D/2.5D graphics user- interface experience including vector graphics, packed in a very small silicon area for power- and cost-sensitive, small display devices (e.g. sport smartwatch, embedded display) with an SoC sporting a 32-bit MCU. It comes with drivers for RTOS and Linux, supports 3rd party graphic frameworks (e.g. Qt) but also has its own proprietary lightweight NEMA®|gfx-API and NEMA®| GUI-Builder a tool to create your own graphical user interface (GUI).


• NEMA®|tiny - is the industry’s smallest 3D GPU. It features OpenGL® ES, multicore scalability, implements a fully configurable and programmable 3D graphics rendering engine, It is designed to support mid-range to higher quality wearables and embedded devices that require a more powerful 3D user interface sporting an SoC with 32-bit processor.


• NEMA®|small - is the most powerful 3D GPU of the NEMA®-GPU Series. The multicore architecture is scalable, contains functionalities for advanced 3D graphics rendering-acceleration, general-purpose computing-functions, is heavily multithreaded and equipped with a number of floating point vector cores. It brings graphics performance and ultra-low power consumption to advanced mobile and embedded compute devices, and supports Linux, Android, RTOS and several APIs such as OpenGL® ES, OpenCL®, Vulkan, uGFX, and Qt.


• NEMA®|dc 100/200/400/700 - is a powerful ultra-low power display controller-series, supporting up to seven layers, which can be scaled, clipped, positioned and composed on the final display by overlaying video, subtitles, graphics, cursors or application windows, with or without transparency. With supported display resolutions from 320x320 up to 8k, NEMA®|dc covers a wide range of products, from little-screen smartwatches to 8k smart TVs. A driver for Android Hardware Composer (HWC) allows NEMA|dc to accelerate the hardware abstraction-level transparently to the software. A bare metal library of primitive graphics functions (available in pure ANSI C with no dependencies), allows the easy portability to systems running RTOS or OS-less systems enabling composition features.

ARC-specific Support Details

The Synopsys ARC® and Think Silicon teams developed an IoT platform for display devices with the ARC EM5D processor and NEMA®|GPU and NEMA® Display Controller including NEMA®|GFX-API. The solution is aimed for developers who want to rapidly implement high-quality 2.5D graphics in connected ultra-low power wearables and embedded devices with reduced cost and increased battery life.

Learn more about how Think Silicon and Synopsys work together.