ChipCrunch.com

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.

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.

Last time we caught up with Quantance was all the way back in 2008, at which point the company just completed a Series B round of funding and was hard at work on their first chip, namely the Q1000. The company has made quite a bit of progress hence, the least of which is sporting a new logo and an updated web-site with spiffier graphics. The technology and general idea remain the same, but at least this time they are illustrated with style - just take a look at the picture below and compare it to the one in out previous post:

It is not very often that we run across a semiconductor startup out of Europe these days, most of them are either located in the US, particularly California, or Israel, so it is nice to see Baolab Microsystems makes some head waves recently. Founded in 2003, Baolab is headquartered in Barcelona, Spain and over the last few years the company has been developing Nano Embedded Mechanical System or NanoEMS for short. NanoEMS can be thought of as Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS), except smaller and embedded directly into a System-on-Chip (SoC) using a standard CMOS process.