We’ve heard it many times before: Venture Capitalists (VCs) are no longer interested in semiconductor startups. They are too expensive, take too long, and the return on investment (ROI) is simply not there to justify the risk and the capital requirements. To be frank, many of these claims can be substantiated with data. Take for example the National Venture Capital Association data we analyzed in the middle of last year, where it was clearly evident that over the last decade the amount of investment into semiconductors has been decreasing year over year. And while the low came shortly after 2008, as expected, the trend has not reversed significantly since then. Similar data has been obtained by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) and as show in the table below depicts the amount of funding for fabless companies over the last decade:
GSA, Capital Lite Working Group
Adapteva, an epiphany in more ways than one
When discussing companies developing many-core processors, as opposed to multi-core processors, several companies come to mind. On the network side of the spectrum where packet processing is one of the major tasks two companies, Cavium and NetLogic, are frequently encountered. The former has the Octeon II product family which features up to 32 MIPS cores, while the latter offers the XLP II products family with up to 80 nxCPUs. When it comes to general applications, a more recent newcomer by the name of Tilera comes to mind. Tilera’s top of the line product family, the Tile-Gx, features devices with up to a 100 identical cores in a mesh network configuration. An even more recent newcomer to the latter segment is Adapteva, and while other copmanies are content with just a few hundred cores, this company intends to scale their design initially to only a modest 4096 cores.
Movidius, mobile 3D capture and editing
The last time we covered Movidius in depth, back in 2008, the company was actually called Movidia. We couldn’t help but poke a little fun at the company name and the similarity to nVidia, so it might not be all that surprising that the company has undergone a name change. Of course, Movidius has done a lot more than just that over the last couple of years. For one, the company has had several successful venture funding rounds. In May of last year the company raised $7.5M in Series B funding from Celtic House Venture Partners, Capital E, Emertec Gestion, AIB Seed Capital Fund as well as angel investors. A couple weeks ago the company raised an additional $9M in Series C funding from the same investors, bringing the total amount of capital raised at this point to $30M.
GSA Silicon Series, opportunities in analog/mixed-signal design - part II
In part I of the GSA silicon series recap on opportunities in analog/mixed-signal design we covered the general trends as presented by Sanjay Krishna, and opportunities as presented by Tyson Tuttle. The last part of of the series consisted of a brief panel discussion on “The Brave New Frontier of Analog/Mixed-Signal at 28nm and Below.” The panel was moderated by Mahesh Tirupattur, Executive VP at Analog Bits, and the panel included: Joze Alvarez - Design Collateral Manager at Freescale Semiconductor, John Heinlein - VP of Marketing for the Physical IP Division at ARM, Ana Hunter - VP Foundry at Samsung Semiconductor, and KT Moore - VP of Product Marketing and Business Development at Magma Design Automation. What follows is a summary in paraphrased form of the opinions expressed by the panelists during the discussion:
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@icdboss noted, hopefully they will have a better experience dealing with Samsung locally, given the company's large presence in Austin