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The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) recently posted their annual VC investment prediction survey results for 2008. Conducted in December of this year, the survey included predictions from more than 170 respondents. Overall, the total amount of investment expected for ’08 is in the 20-29 billion dollar range, which is at best a slight increase over ’07 and a far cry from the 100 billion dollar level that was reached in 2000. The top three investment regions that VCs are most leery of are South America, China and Eastern Europe. Although VCs seem to be concerned about these regions, it is unlikely that these concerns will be a show-stopper for deals that will take place in these regions, as long as the potential rewards are large enough. As expected, clean technology startups are poised to experience the highest growth in investment, followed by media, biotech and internet startups. Flat to moderate investment growth is expected for medical device, wireless telecom, and software startups. However, a staggering 50% of the respondents expect a decrease in semiconductor investment, with another 37% expecting the investment to stay about flat. On the flipside, VCs also predict that clean technology will be the most overvalued industry in 2008, while semiconductors will be the most undervalued. Even though at first glance the above seems like rather gloomy news for semiconductor startups it is hard to overlook that most of the highest investment growth industries will require significant contributions and breakthroughs from semiconductor suppliers, especially on the low-power side. Thus, it seems not too far of a stretch to surmise that as companies in the currently VC favored industries tackle difficult problems; semiconductor startups will rise to the challenge and assist them in their endeavors. These companies in turn will require venture funding themselves which might lead to an underestimated upswing in semiconductor funding as we progress through ’08. On the more general economic front, the VCs also address several other issues such as the sub-prime credit woes, oil prices, dollar strength, and take a shot at the upcoming presidential election in the United State.

Massive parallel processor architectures seem to be the new way to riches, or at least something that might earn you a few minutes in the spotlight. But what good is all the parallel processing power if hardly anyone is able to utilize it effectively? This is precisely the question that must have been asked by Ambric’s founders when they decided to start the company. Founded in 2003 and with a head count just short of sixty, Ambric made a splash with their Am2045 processor when it was introduced last fall. Fabricated in the 0.13 micron process, it featured 360 32-bit RISC cores that when all running at 333MHz could deliver a theoretical performance of about one trillion operations per second. What was even more interesting though was the novel programming approach that assumed that due to the abundance of cores, software objects could be mapped on a core by core basis, thus not having to share resources. This idea is depicted in the figure below, where the numbers 1 through 7 represent the individual cores that are linked via communication channels. When Ambric's compiler detects that a software object is a primitive object it maps it to a single processor, however, when more complex computations are required several cores can be combined into a composite object which than will host the more complex application.

Given the object oriented programming model; it is not surprising that Ambric chose Java as the fundamental development language for the processor. Utilizing the Eclipse development framework and a few proprietary language extensions, the task of programming this massive array of processors seems to require less of a learning curve than most other massively parallel architectures, that either force programmers to learn new and unfamiliar languages, or might even require the usage of Verilog or VHDL. This is likely to be a major advantage for Ambric, for time to market is important and the shorter it takes for programmer to start cranking out useful code rather than "hello world" applications, the more likely they are going to favor one architecture over another. Now, with all this Java talk, do not think of the Am2045 as a Java chip, for the source code is not compiled into Java bytecode, but rather directly into the native machine language. For a complete overview of the architecture as well as short programming and development tool discussion, take a look at the Microprocessor Report article by Tom R. Halfhill that Ambric was nice enough to post on their web-site. It has some very good illustrations and additionally discusses Ambric’s closest competitors.

In the meantime, Ambric has not been standing still. At the beginning of November, it was reported that Ambric was nearing the close of a $30 million funding round that would bring the total funding for the company to $51 million to date. Additionally, the company has also been busy working on delivering the Am2045B processor to market. Compared to the AM2045, the Am2045B delivers a 40 percent increase in channel connectivity between the cores, and each core is now able to run at up to 350 MHz. Additionally, Ambric also claims that the power consumption has been reduced by 40 percent, or to about 6 to 12 Watts depending on the application. For about $325 a pop, in quantities of thousands, this is quite some processing power one can obtain with what looks to be a very promising development environment.

David Manners on his Electronics Weekly Blog titled Mannerisms had an interesting post the other week titled “Why Are There Fewer Chip Start-Up Successes?” Apparently, this question was raised over at the Future Horizons’ System and SOC Conference in Prague the other month.  Several executives from startups, including Lattice Semiconductor and Icera Semiconductor, responded to the question although there seemed to be only modest overlap in their answers. On the one hand, it was suggested that the bar got raised on the funding, and that additionally VCs simply were no longer willing to take big risks. Another point of view was that that unlike the 80s, the 90s simply lacked radical new innovations on the semiconductor side which yielded fewer opportunities for startups to take advantage of the new advances. Or, could it be that the VCs’ focus might have simply shifted over the last couple of decades away from semiconductors to other exciting fields: First, toward internet startups in the late 90s, then toward bio-engineering, and as of late in the direction of clean-fuel technologies and web 2.0 startups. There is no reason for VCs to be different than most regular investors, when a sector is hot, more and more money tends to flow that way. Additionally, the shorter the time frame for an investment to potentially yield a lucrative return, and the lower the initial investment required, the more investment interest it is likely to receive. Let’s face it, web startups need significantly less capital and time to turn a profit for their investors than chip startups, and thus are also significantly less of a risk. There is always something to be said about long term investing and enormous payoffs, but since lately VCs seem to prefer riding trends rather than budging them, maybe they are also partaking in our culture’s ever decreasing attention spans.

You’ve worked several years for a large corporation with a decent salary and good benefits. After a while though you got bored of being just another peon, who did a lot but was rarely recognized, so you made up your mind and decided to jump ship, only to land in yet another large corporation. Sure you might have a higher salary now, or maybe even an office rather than a cube, but this achievement is likely to wear off as you realize that you are more or less number in a huge database of other numbers. Fed up with large firms you are craving something more exciting, and so you decide that a small startup where each team member knows you by name would be a welcome change.

Which is exactly where the problem begins for finding a job with a startup company is not exactly an easy task. First of all, major job-search web sites don’t usually have an option to filter search results by startup-company. Then again, many early stage startups probably don’t use these services anyhow, rather opting for local job-sites that might yield a better return on investment. Another strategy might be to search for startup companies directly; however, if you’ve ever tried this approach using just about any of the major search engines out there, you came away with many search results, but most of them irrelevant. Yet another strategy is to visit venture capital firm websites and examine their portfolio companies. This however is a very tedious process: First you have to find the actual venture capital firm website, then you have to look through companies that the firm is currently funding, find some that might be of interest to you, and only then examine those company web-sites for possible job listings. That is, if you are lucky and the company is no longer operating in stealth-mode and actually has a functional web-site.

As it turns out, the process of finding a gig with a startup company can be a lot simpler thanks to VentureLoop. The premise of the service is simple; bring startups, entrepreneurs and talent together. Thus, satisfying individuals that are interested in startups while helping startups locate talent they would most likely miss on the large job-posting sites. To make this happen, VentureLoop works directly with venture-backed startup companies as well as venture capital firms and is able to aggregate job postings that usually cannot be found on other job boards. Although the company has been around since 1999, it is not clear how long their startup job posting service has been online, since the logo still seems to indicate that it is in Beta. After signing up for an account, which only takes a few seconds, the site works like most other job-boards: you can search for jobs based on keywords or geographic location, create your own profile, create a search agent that will alert you of new openings, and apply for available positions - with the distinguished advantage that all positions are with startup companies. You can search for summer internship opportunities as well, albeit this functionality is currently restricted to Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan students, and an official school email address is required to gain access to that part of the site. Anyhow, if you’re yearning for the excitement and stress that only a startup can offer, and of course a possible buyout or IPO that will make you rich beyond  your wildest dreams, you would be making a mistake by not giving VentureLoop a look.