Datacube Inc.

Datacube was founded as Datacube SMK, Inc., in 1978 by Stanley Michael Karandanis (1934–2007) and J. Stewart Dunn (1941–2020). Dunn and Karandanis headquartered Datacube SMK in Danvers, Massachusetts; it shares its name with an earlier company founded in 1969 by Karandanis, called Datacube Corporation. That company's only product was a precision, miniature (1.6-cubic inch) power supply for integrated circuits. The Datacube Corporation was founded in Billerica, Massachusetts, but later moved to Salem, New Hampshire. Initially, Datacube SMK manufactured board-level products for the Multibus, one of the first computer buses developed for microprocessors. Early boards designed by Dunn for Datacube SMK were PROM, RAM and character generator boards. Character display boards, such as the VT-103 and VR-107, were used in programmable read-only memory (PROM) programmers and similar systems.

Early in his career, Datacube's president and CEO Stanley Karandanis followed the leaders in the semiconductor field from Transitron to Bell Labs. Karandanis was the director of engineering at Monolithic Memories (MMI) when John Birkner and H.T. Chua designed the first successful programmable logic device, the programmable array logic (PAL) device. His contacts in the semiconductor field were instrumental in providing Datacube with components for its products. As well, programmable logic was important to Datacube's functional density: from the early days of bipolar PALs and PROMs to generic array logic (GAL), to every generation of FPGAs from Xilinx and then Actel and Quick Logic and Altera CPLDs. Said Rick Cooley, a hardware engineer at Datacube, "We use programmables like other designers use jellybeans".

In early 1980, Datacube introduced the VG-120, a frame grabber built on a single Multibus board. At the time, a frame grabber was a large box with multiple boards. The VG-120 was the first ever commercial single-board frame grabber; based on programmable array logic (PAL), it had a 320 × 240 × 6-bit resolution, grayscale video input and output.

Karandanis hired Rashid Beg and Robert Wang from Matrox to develop the first Q-Bus (DEC LSI-11) frame grabber. They developed the QVG/QAF-120 dual board, an 8-bit product primarily for a new startup named Cognex. While the latter were developing the hardware for Datacube, they were also planning to spin off and form a competitor, Imaging Technology, Inc. (ITI). To recover from this loss, and to complete the QVG-120 product, Dave Erickson was hired as a consultant in 1981 from Octek by the engineering manager Paul Bloom. Erickson came on full-time in 1982, as did Dave Simmons who was to head applications, and Bob Berger, who was to head software. At this time, ITI was developing a line of frame grabber products for Multibus and Q-Bus, with a real time image processor based on a single-point multiplier, adder and lookup table (LUT). In 1983, Karandanis hired Shep Siegel from Ampex, who had worked on the advanced and successful Ampex Digital Optics (ADO) real-time video spatial manipulator for the broadcast television market. At Datacube, Siegel developed a line of modular machine-vision products for the Motorola's VMEbus. The first in the line, the VVG-128 first video-acquisition, frame-grabber, and display system for the VMEbus, intended for factory automation. With Dunn's help, Simmons developed the VG-123 Multibus and Q-Bus frame grabber boards. During this development, Paul Bloom died, and Dave Erickson was promoted to engineering manager to replace Bloom.