Licensing

Klark Teknik is making SuperMAC and HyperMAC available to the audio industry through specialist third party developer companies AuviTran and ZP Engineering in the form of Software Development Kits (SDKs) for use with Xilinx Spartan-3E and -3S series field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

The actual SuperMAC and HyperMAC core designs remain the intellectual property of Klark Teknik and will be supplied in the SDKs as encrypted ‘black boxes’ with supporting unencrypted interfacing logic designs as part of the SDKs. The SuperMAC SDK has already been released to our development partners AuviTran and ZP Engineering and the HyperMAC SDK is expected to be released in Q4 2009.

Audio manufacturers looking to adopt SuperMAC and HyperMAC should contact our development partners Auvitran and ZP Engineering, who can offer modules for easy integration as well as custom design solutions. In conjunction with signing a contract with the chosen developer, the manufacturer will also be required to sign a one-off sub-licence agreement with MUSIC Group Research UK Limited. to incorporate SuperMAC and/or HyperMAC in their products, for which a £500.00 charge will be made as a contribution to our administration costs. We feel that this fee is set at an appropriate level to not discourage bona fide audio manufacturers from wanting to adopt our interfaces.

No further fees are payable to Klark Teknik including royalties on either a per connection or per channel basis. We have our own manufacturing business with both Midas and Klark Teknik, and we have decided not to operate a business model based on licensing intellectual property via royalty payments to encourage the adoption of our SuperMAC and HyperMAC implementations. Any other contractual agreements between our developers and their clients remain confidential to both parties and are of no business interest to Klark Teknik.

We welcome the fact that our developers’ clients may well be direct competition for Midas and Klark Teknik and we recognise that operational separation must exist between us and our developers to ensure developer-client confidentiality. To provide a clear basis for this separation, it is expressly written into the contracts that we have set up with our developers that MUSIC Group Research UK Limited. are specifically excluded as a third party from any confidentiality agreements set up between our developers and their clients. Apart from the identity of the clients, we are not entitled to know anything about the work carried out between developers and clients until the clients choose to make the development project public.