Savage Innovations, Inc. (company)

Savage Innovations, LLC. is a privately held company in Huntsville, AL. Savage Innovations designs, manufactures, and sells ooPIC micro controllers, the SoundGin Sound Synthesizer, and educational curriculums.

Business

Origins

Established in 1983, in Edmond, OK, Savage Innovations started as a contract engineering service producing one of a kind custom devices such as "Lefty - the checker playing robot".

Recent Business and Acquisitions

In late 2004, Savage Innovations entered into a contractual arrangement with Microchip. The trademark name "OOPic" is now a registered trademark of Microchip Inc. As of this agreement, the trademark name formerly known as "Object Oriented Programmable IC" is now known as "Object Oriented PIC". Thus the acronym is now written "ooPIC"

In 2005, Pentar Inc., (now "NAT Seattle") a manufacturing firm in Huntsville, AL acquired a significant portion of STOCK in Savage Innovations bringing their manufacturing and distribution expertise to the table.

On April 13, 2006, Savage Innovations acquired the OOPic support division from Magnevation

Hardware

Micro Controllers

In 1997, the OOPic I micro controller module was released. The OOPic was so named because it was an Object Oriented Programmable IC. Programmed in BASIC, the OOPic I encapsulated the hardware components of the Microchip PIC16C64 processor into "objects".

The popularity of the OOPic I in the electronic hobbyists and educational market drove the product line and in 2001, the OOPic II was released. The OOPic II expanded the object set past the simple encapsulations of the PIC16C64's hardware. It included objects for driving controlling a wide variety of hardware devices like servo motors, sonars, etc. Each object was designed to work in a multitasking fashion just as the PIC16C64's hardware does.

In 2002 and 2003, two new form factors were released. The OOPic-R and the OOPic-C.

Sound Synthesis

In early 2004, Savage Innovations finished four year, co-developed product with Magnevation called Speakjet. The Speakjet is a single chip voice synthesizer.

Showcased at the 2006 Microchip MASTERs Conference, the SoundGin Sound Synthesizer is a sound synthesizer in a PIC. The SoundGin produces complex sound effects, synthesizer style music and English speech with an unlimited vocabulary. It is intended for use in manufactured electronics and home projects.

Software

In 2006, after two years of development time, a new compiler was showcased at the Microchip MASTERs Conference. With a beta released in the first quarter of 2007, the ooPIC compiler version 6 is a step toward future ooPIC development systems in that it provides a hierarchical (versus flat) object environment.