The Rapport technology, known as Kilocore, will initially be aimed at portable applications like digital video delivered to cellphones. According to Mr. Singer, reconfigurable logic promises better energy efficiency, which has become a watchword in large computer data centers as well.

Mr. Singer said Rapport, which raised $7 million last year and is based in Redwood City, Calif., licensed a computing design from researchers at Carnegie Mellon.

That approach has permitted Rapport to create a chip with 256 computing elements that can be configured on the fly to adapt to different software problems. A follow-on version of the chip will have more than 1,000 computing elements and will contain a version of I.B.M.'s Power PC microprocessor.

This sounds familiar...