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Back in August of last year we profiled Tilera when the company unveiled their TILE64 multi-core processor at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. And while some of the largest semiconductor players have struggled mightily over the last year, simply take a look at the dismal performance of the top 10 firms over the last year, Tilera has been busy executing their vision of what multi-core processors ought to be. Earlier this year, the company introduced the TILEPro family of processors which are targeted at the advanced networking and digital video market. With the introduction the company claimed a 35x performance per watt improvement over an Intel Quad-Core Xeon processor. It would have been nice for Tilera to have shared some workload and benchmarking data at least for those of us that like to dwell on details.

Anyhow, when you have a complete development environment with chips that deliver on promised performance, in other words the complete package, good things tend to happen. About one year after initial product availability, Tilera now claims to have over 15 design wins and is engaged with over 45 customers. Not a bad year at all, and to top it off the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) just bestowed on Tilera the Start-Up to watch award. Good job guys, keep up the great work! Engineers and entrepreneurs alike need a beacon on the hill to look up to in these less than sunny days.

There is no doubt that obtaining funding for a semiconductor startup in this economy is anything but easy - simply take a look at our post regarding Ambric's faith. But not all is lost, as Quantance demonstrates; obtaining venture capital is still possible. Just a few days ago, the company managed to obtain $12 million in Series B funding from TD Fund, DOCOMO Capital, Granite Ventures, and InterWest Partners. Quantance intends to use this money to commercialize their patented radio frequency (RF) technology for 3G wireless devices.

We’ve covered quite a few startups targeting wireless devices this year: Black Sand Technologies working on silicon based power amplifiers, WiSpry developing programmable RF products, and finally BitWave Semiconductor and their Softranciever technology - obviously the wireless sector is hot. Quantance’s goal is to improve the efficiency of RF transmit circuits in wireless products, and is shown in the figure below:

As can be seen, the company intends to improve the efficiency in three ways. First, the company proposes a supply voltage loop which modifies the supply voltage of the power amplifier (PA) to track the RF signal modulation. Second, for this to happen, Quantance had to develop an ultra-fast, low noise, power converter. Finally, they also integrated a closed-loop correction system to correct the incoming signal before it reaches the PA. These three things should yield several benefits: Since the voltage to the PA no longer needs to constantly stay at an elevated level, the power consumption and heat dissipation for this solution should be lower than that of competing units. Quantance claims that battery current savings might be as high as 30-40% and temperature reduction could be as high as 50%. I would suspect that these savings are highly dependant on the peak-to-average ratio (PAR) of the incoming signal, as such, the numbers above don’t really tell the whole story. Additionally, the company claims that their new approach will allow for a 20-30% increase in coverage range without an increase in battery drain.

These promised power-savings are likely music to the ears of mobile device developers, who are tired of consumers complaining about the shorter than expected battery-life of the current batch of 3G devices – which is probably why the company was able to score some more funding. Quantance’s first chip, the Q1000, began sampling in Q2 of 2008 and is expected to enter full fledged production in Q2 of 2009. As mentioned before, initially the company will target 3G mobile devices, but eventually plans to address other potential markets such a long term evolution (LTE) and WiMAX devices.

It seems that at times we go through dry spells with relatively little news relating to semiconductor or chip startups, but then when things do happen they seem to happen all at once. With that said, a lot of news is not necessarily good news, as is the case with Ambric Inc. According to this eetimes.com article, the company failed to close on a $15 million round of series C funding, and had no choice but to close down. We wrote about Ambric last December, and found their software approach as well as the proposed Am2045 processor quite elegant. The combination of Java for its object-orientation, the Eclipse development framework, and a compiler which translates the code into a native machine language that maps simple objects to single cores and complex objects to multiple cores, seemed particularly promising. Further, according to the eetimes.com article, the company had quite a few design wins particularly in the video processing and medical fields. The additional funding was likely required because the company failed to successfully commercialize the Kerstel prototype chip which they first announced back in 2006. It is very disappointing that the company needed to obtain additional cash to stay afloat in this less than startup friendly environment, yet at the same time surprising that VCs decided to pull the plug on what at least externally seemed like a very promising approach.  Hopefully, some more well-funded company or a wealthy individual out there will find Amric’s ideas interesting enough to buy them and carry them forward – Who knows, Transmeta, a company that a lot of people have written off for a long time now, just got acquired by startup Novafora the other day.

Back in August, we wrote about Plurality and the additional funding that the company obtained for their HyperCore Architecture Line (HAL) of chips. At that point, we had several questions for the company. For example, we wondered what happened to the 64-core 90nm part that was supposed to ship in Q3 of 2007? We speculated that the company either encountered some problem with the initial architecture or that what the company attempted was not feasible in 90nm. We also had concerns about the efficiency of the task map programming model that the company was pursuing. Well, recently Alan Singer, Plurality’s VP of Sales and Marketing, commented on our article to explain the product delay. Additionally, just a couple of days ago Plurality announced at the Multicore Expo in Japan the beta release of a complete set of tools for the HAL processors line.

You can read Alan’s complete comment regarding our post here (below the article). In summary, there were no issues with the initial architecture, however, due to price, performance, size, and power requirements expressed by potential customers the company opted to use the 65nm processes instead of the 90nm process for the 64-core chip. So we were partially right about 90nm not being the right process node for what the company was attempting. Plurality also intends to use the 65nm process for the 256-core part. Unlike what management sometimes believes, taking a design from one process node and porting it to the next one is not exactly a walk in the park, as many an engineer will attest.  As such, the new target dates for these processors are the second half of 2009 and 2010, respectively.  An FPGA-based evaluation board featuring 32 cores should be available in Q2 of 2009.

In addition to working on the processors themselves, Plurality has been busy optimizing their development tools. As mentioned above, the company has just released a beta version of their development tools which consists of a cycle-accurate simulator, a GCC cross-compiler and GNU Binutils, a cross-debugger which is compatible with the Eclipse development environment, and finally an emulator. The tools can be immediately downloaded free of charge over here, although a brief registration is mandatory.  Additionally, Plurality is also developing acceleration boards featuring the HAL chips which can connect to the main CPU either via the PCI Express interface, or specifically to AMD processors, through a HyperTransport link via AMD’s Torrenza initiative.  Good to see that Pluarity is making progress and given some spare time it would be interesting to take the development tools for a spin.