Startup Blurbs

SPICE simulations are the essential tool for any circuit designer. Without an accurate SPICE simulator a company might as well forget about reasonable yields when the chip finally tapes out. Nevertheless, with the ever increasing device counts and thus netlists, chip designers have had to make a choice between acceptable accuracy and reasonable runtimes. To overcome this tradeoff, circuit designers have been using many tricks to make current designs possible. For example, instead of simulating an entire block, a particular path of interest can be pruned and then simulated. Another trick is to mix and match extracted cells with cells for which parasitic are estimated on the flight. Yet another approach is to utilize fast-spice simulators, which instead of simulating each device and solving the equations associated with it, employ device switching approximations to estimate how the circuit is going to behave. Regardless, not matter how you slice and dice it, accuracy of the simulation is compromised in each case.

But usually, where there is an interesting problem to solve, you can expect a startup to emerge trying to solve it. Case in point, Cupentino, California based Xoomsys Technology. Backed by Benchmark Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, and Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, and have just finished second round funding which netted the company a nice $8 million, Xoomsys believe they have found a reasonable solution for the circuit designer’s dilemma. As the illustration below shows, Xoomsys proposes to parallelize the simulation onto a cluster of x86 machines.

The approach is quite elegant and is implemented via what the company refers to as Scalable Performance using Enhanced Effective Decoupling, or SPEED for short. In layman’s terms, SPEED takes an existing netlist and parses it into individual and smaller netlists that can then be sent off to multiple systems that run a regular SPICE simulator on each of the netlists in parallel. The breakthrough here is the ability for Xoomsys the parse the initial netlist in such a way as to minimize the communication between the parallel machines while at the same time balancing the load across all the machines. The minimization in communication is accomplished by figuring out which parts of the netlists are mostly decoupled from each other and as such can be simulated individually. Most importantly, Xoomsys guarantees that the final output of the simulation, when all the pieces are combined back together, will be identical to that of a regular SPICE simulation that would have run on the original netlist. As such, what Xoomsys offers is more of an extension that enables a company to utilize their preferred SPICE engine more efficiently.  And while performance numbers are not listed anywhere on the site, the technology itself seems quite promising.

In general, publicity is good thing for a company – so it is nice to see XMOS Semiconductor finally emerging from stealth-mode and providing some information to the public on their company and what they claim to be a revolutionary new type of programmable semiconductor technology called Software-Defined Silicon (SDS). Now don’t get too excited, the web site is still relatively sparse on details, but a quick email to XMOS resulted in a nice presentation style response that provided more insight. Founded in 2005 and backed by Amadeus Capital Partners and Esprit Capital Partners, XMOS currently consist of a team of 25 people out of Bristol, England. The company is headed by James Foster, who has previously held a CEO position at Oxford Semiconductor and before that held various engineering positions at Lucent and Lattice Semiconductor. The CTO for the company is David May, who is well known for his invention of the Transputer and the OCCAM programming language

According to XMOS, SDS will provide designers with the advantages that are usually associated with System on a Chip (SOC) solutions while at the same time providing the flexibility that FPGAs offer. SDS is implemented as an array of XCore event driven multi-threaded processor elements which are linked via an XLink inter-core communication link, both of which can be easily programmed and configured through XC - an XMOS C-style proprietary language. The advantage of this approach is that the whole system can be specified using a high-level language and no more RTL coding is necessary. Further, the whole system can be reconfigured in about the same time that it takes to recompile the actual code. The chart below summarizes the advantages of SDS versus competing technologies:

Designing ASICs is very risky unless you have really high volumes. ASSPs are less costly, but since they are sold to many companies, differentiation becomes difficult. FPGAs have almost everything going for them - except that they are very silicon inefficient, which makes them expensive and utterly unusable for high-volume consumer products that have very low margins.  The fashion criterion displayed in the chart is utterly beyond me, but as you can see SDS is fashionable as well. On the performance front, the XCore is expected to yield a performance in the 500 MIPS range. Also, developers will be able to dynamically partition resources between control processing (MIPS), DSP processing (MSPS), and I/O processing (Mbps). The key to SDS success will be whether or not XMOS will be able to deliver a robust and intuitive programming environment; without this ability most developers will likely shy away since there is nothing more frustrating than dealing with buggy tools. More technical details of the architecture and tools are scheduled to be released in Q4 of 2007 and the launch of the first device family with the complete tools set and IP library is to follow in Q1 of 2008.

Startups are exciting, whether you are simply interested in the new technology that they might be developing or are looking to join one early and hope to cash out big through an initial public offering or through being acquired. Maybe you are just looking for ideas for your own startup and browsing through what other startups might be doing might just give you that needed spark that will put you on the right path. In any case, EETimes.com just updated their list of the top 60 semiconductor startups for 2007. The list is not exactly detailed about what each company does, but at least it provides a quick snapshot on each company and a web address. Not that the web address is of much use in some cases; for example, XMOS Semiconductor and Unity Semiconductor have a little more than welcome pages and that’s about it. However, this seems to be an exception as most startups are eager to tell you a lot about their upcoming products and it also seems that most of them are actively hiring. While many of the startups on this year’s list can be found on previous lists, there are several new ones, including: Ambric, Artimi, Athena Design, Blaze DFM, Boston Circuits, Codeplay, Mirics Semiconductor, Nanoradio, Nemerix, Nemoptic, Prime Sense, Takumi Technology, Tilera, Unity Semiconductor, XMOS Semiconductor, and Xoomsys. You can find the complete list of all the selected startups here.