Startup Blurbs

First things first: Why would you pick a name which sounds so similar to nVidia? I’ve had friends who’s startups had names that differed by more than a mere two letters from other brand names, but still got letters from brand lawyers from similarly names companies within days. Just strange, but I suppose investigating naming choices is beyond the scope of this blog.

Movidia is a fabless semiconductor startup based out of Dublin, Ireland, and has just secured $14 million in Series A funding led by Celtic House Venture Partners and Enterprise Ireland. The company intends to enable users to be able to edit videos directly on their mobile devices. Especially, they are targeting the always on-the-go users, who contribute a lot of User Generated Content (UGC), but rarely have time to sit down and edit their content on a PC. There really is not much information available regarding the actual processors that the company intends to develop, other than the claim that they are supposed to be low-power. Since the company targets a lot of video processing, where a lot of parallelization can be exploited by working on different parts of the image simultaneously, one could expect either a multi-core processor or something along a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) vector processor.

There are a couple of issues that seem to bother me about the company’s strategy, although they are simply guesses without knowing what the company is actually developing. First, it is unlikely that mobile device developers will want to integrate an extra chip into their devices. They are having enough trouble with battery life on the current crop of smart-phones as it is. As such, it would seem the company would have to develop a chip that implements all the other basic cell-phone functionality as well. Which leads directly to the second problem - they would have to go up against the mobile processor giants such as Qualcomm, TI, and even possibly Intel depending on the final power envelope. All of these companies have mobile chips and sophisticated development tools to go along with them – which would make it difficult for Movidia to compete. Then again, Sean Mitchell has been around the semiconductor industry for a long time, and has lead Parthus Technologies through an IPO in 2000, so he just might have a few aces up his sleeve. Until Movidia reveals more about what exactly they are developing, enjoy the video below that the company created as an introduction.

If you are not actively involved in the telecommunications market you might be puzzled by the term femtocell. Sound like a bio-engineering term, or maybe a novel type of memory? Not even close. Essentially, it is nothing more than a small cellular base station which connects to a service provider’s network via a broadband internet connection. It is capable of simultaneously supporting a few mobile devices, and as such is mostly targeted at the small business and residential markets, where it can extend indoor service coverage. Femtocells are of quite some interest to mobile operators, who are always looking at extending the reach and capacity of their networks. Additionally, Forward Concepts is projecting a compound annual growth rate for femtocell based equipment of 126% over the next four years to $4.9 billion in 2012.

Where there are hot emerging markets and problems to be solved, you can always count on startups appearing to tackle them, such is the case with Percello. Founded in 2007, Percello is a fabless semiconductor company based out of Herzliya, Israel that specializes in digital baseband solutions for the 3G/HSDPA/HSUPA/HSPA+/LTE femtocell markets. Earlier this month, the company raised $12 million in Series B funding from Granite Ventures and Vertex Venture Capital which will be primarily used to finish the development of the PRC6000 Digital Baseband Processor for the UMTS femtocells.

The PRC6000, is Percello’s first chip in the Aquilo Family, which integrates all UMTS baseband functions on a single piece of silicon. The Aquilo architecture combines several programmable cores with dedicated accelerators and, according to the company, Aquilo chips can be cascaded to linearly increase the maximum number of concurrent users. As for the PRC6000, from previous press-release we know that Percello licensed the MIPS32 24Kc Core from MIPS Technologies in July. The 24Kc is a synthesizable core that runs at a clock speed of at least 700MHz in a 65nm process. Additionally, Percello also licensed the Ceva TeakLite III 32-bit DSP earlier this month, which runs above 550 MHz in a 65nm process. As such, it can be assumed that the PRC6000 is a combination of these two, in addition to whatever else Percello decides to integrate onto the die. It will support up to 8 simultaneous users and has a coverage radius of approximately 500m.  Mass production is expected to begin in the first half of 2009. Additional PRC6000 specification can be found here.

The company founders Shlomo Gadot, Yoav Volloch, and Rafy Carmon are all ex-LSI Logic, and beforehand were with Agere which was acquired by LSI in 2007.  As such they have quite a bit of experience with SOCs, nevertheless they will have their work cut out for them for as the market for femtocells takes off, many of the established players in the baseband market are likely to either adapt their solutions to this new segment or will go on acquisition sprees.

The American economy has definitely seen better days, no secrete there, but how to get out of this mess is another issue. Economic problems manifest themselves in many ways, with the most spectacular being the failures of giant corporations that are supposed to represent the bedrock of the economy. Well, if the giants are failing, why not encourage startups and entrepreneurship to get the economy going again? This is along the lines that Sramana Mitra seems to be thinking in her latest article at Forbes.com.

A quite successful entrepreneur in her own right, having founded and sold several software/web startups, and a strategy consultant in Silicon Valley since 1994, Sramana suggest that what the government really ought to do is give the entrepreneur a stimulus package. The package she is suggesting is an entrepreneurship-friendly tax policy targeted at entrepreneurs, angle investors, venture capital firms, and large corporation. In her article she examines the particular policies for each of the aforementioned groups in detail, but overall they can be summarized as follows: A tax-free pool of income for entrepreneurs and angel investors that can be reinvested into new ventures, an elimination of payroll taxes for small companies, a tired tax-structure for venture capital firms to once again encourages them to take some risks and invest in early stage startups in return for a lower tax on deals realized from those investments, and finally, tax breaks for large companies to invest into small business that in some form or other can in turn utilize the products and service offered by these large conglomerates. These are some interesting ideas indeed and definitely something to contemplate, especially when looking for more of a long-term plan for the country rather than a short-term stimulus package like the last one that was implemented by the goverment.

If you are interested in entrepreneurship in general you might also want to periodically take a glance at Sramana’s own blog in which she covers a vast spectrum of Silicon Valley from web startups, to entrepreneurship strategy and stock discussions, and even the occasional semiconductor blurb. As a matter of fact, her post in mid June which analyzed Cadence’s hostile takeover attempt of fellow EDA tool develop Mentor Graphics caused quite a discussion amongst her readers.