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We've covered many semiconductor startups over the years, many of which are nothing more than mere memories of ambitious undertakings. Fortunately, Quantance is not one of these companies, but rather one which has managed to flourish and acquire additional funding over time. We originally covered Quantance back in 2008 when the company raised $12 million in Series B funding, and followed up with more coverage in 2010 when the company raised an additional $11M in Series C funding. Earlier this month Quantance once again went back to the well and secured an additional $12M in Series D funding from existing investors TD Fund, DOCOMO Capital, Granite Ventures, and InterWest Partners.

Just when it seemed that a simultaneous dual band 2.4/5 GHz router was a pretty good thing, there are a couple new standards just around the corner, namely 802.11ac and 802.11ad. The former operates in the 5GHz band and is in many ways considered the successor to the 802.11n standard. It implements a wider RF bandwidth of 80MHz (160MHz is optional) as compared to the 40MHz limit for 802.11n, multi-user MIMO, and high-density modulation which when all combined lead to a link rate of about 433 Mbits/s for a single antenna solution. Companies, such as Quantenna which we covered previously, have already released reference designs for 802.11ac.

Most of the time we either write about semiconductor startups or emerging technologies. But on occasion it can be interesting to take a look at what the big and established guys are doing, particularly when it is presented in a visually pleasing infographic courtesy of Farnell Semiconductors. As the infographic below shows, when it comes to the semiconductor industry, the sales leaders, which include Intel, Samsung, and TSMC, are growing significantly faster than the industry overall. Whereas these top three companies grew their revenue by a very healthy 12%, the overall industry managed a rather lackluster 2%. When it comes to countries, the USA and Taiwan did very well, while South Korea, Europe, and Japan lost market share over the last year - unfortunately the infographic does not contain information on China as it would be interesting to see if the growing fabless industry there has began to take market share from established players. There are several other statistics illustrated in the infographic which might be of interest as well including market share by company and capital expenditures - enjoy!

The race for ever higher clock frequencies in processor design ended many years ago, but engineers never fail envisioning new challenges and pushing design envelopes in new directions. The name of the game today seems to be the amount of cores that can be squeezed onto a single piece of silicon, while keeping the overall power manageable, and making the architecture somewhat programmable in order for the final product to be useful. We recently covered Adapteva and beforehand Tilera, both of which are located in the United States. The former of the two is working on designs which are projected to scale to 4096 cores and beyond. Today we cover Europe’s answer to the manycore challenge, namely Kalray, a startup headquartered in Paris, France which is working on designs consisting of up to 1024 processors.