Embecosm was registered as a Company ten years ago today on 25 April 2008. From our initial contract developing GDB for the Epiphany multicore processor, we have grown to developing full LLVM and GNU tool chains for some of the world’s best known processors.
In that first year, I was the sole employee, before being joined by Joern Rennecke to develop GCC for the Epiphany processor and then a GCC 4.5 version of the MILEPOST machine learning system. Three years later we were joined by Simon Cook, who built up our LLVM development expertise which have grown to be a significant portfolio in our business.
Over the decade we have hosted many interns, at school, undergraduate and PhD level as part of our commitment to inspiring the future generation. One of those staff, Dr James Pallister, went on to win the NMI Young Engineer of the Year award in 2014 while working for Embecosm.
We have a strong commitment to research, and have held four Innovate UK R&D grants, helping to advance our expertise in machine learning compilers, superoptimization and compiler support for secure code. Collaboration with some of Europe’s top universities has ensured we stay at the forefront of compiler technology.
As an open source business, we rely heavily on the work of the wider open source community. All our staff are active contributors to open source projects: we provide the official maintainer for two GCC architectures and one GDB architecture, Simon Cook serves as secretary of the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation and I chair the BCS Open Source Specialist Group. This year we will be hosting the GNU Tools Cauldron in Manchester on 6th to the 9th September 2018, bringing together open source engineers from around the world.
Embecosm was created, not just to be a profitable business, but a place where engineers could undertake world class engineering in a creative and supportive environment where all our staff can enjoy their work, broaden their experience and grow their skills. For the past 10 years this has been our recipe for success. In that time, only two employees have left the company, one of whom continues to work for us part time. We have a created a business which has grown steadily, is profitable and reinvests for the future and the next 10 years.
