Startup Blurbs

Traveling extensively around Europe the last couple of weeks I encountered an all too familiar problem: I was constantly running out of battery life be it for my shaver, cell phone, or laptop computer - there simply never was a power outlet available when needed. When it comes to electronic devices, one can either design a system that consumers less power or one can opt for a battery that can store more charge. The first one is being extensively done already, and in the shrinking world of electronic devices a larger battery is often times not an option. Further, with System on a Chip (SOC) designs integrating ever more functionality and components, any potential battery life gains due to low voltage operation are quickly cancelled out. To compound this problem, the current batch of rechargeable batteries looses significant capacity after only a few hundred recharge cycles. For the weary traveler what is needed are batteries with a higher density that loose less capacity over time. Luckily, there seems to be at least some hope on the horizon.

Earlier this year, we wrote about batteries that are to be composed entirely of liquids and for which the commercialization is expected within the next five years or so. On the exactly opposite side of the spectrum one can find a company called Seeo, a battery startup out of Berkeley, CA which is developing rechargeable lithium batteries utilizing a solid-state polymer electrolyte. Just a few days ago the company raised an additional $8.6 million in funding to bring the total funding to a little over $10 million. Seeo is being pretty stealthy regarding its technology and you won’t find anything but a simple messages on the company’s website informing you that the company is developing advanced materials that will revolutionize electricity storage and delivery. However, digging around the web yielded at little bit of information.

The technology Seeo is using was licensed by the company from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and is based on a nano-structured polymer electrolyte (NPE). Unlike current lithium-ion batteries the NPE based batteries being developed by Seeo have several advantages: They can be designed to resists dendrite growth which under certain circumstances can lead to shorts and potential explosions. They lack the highly flammable liquid electrolytes and are thus inherently safer than traditional lithium-ion batteries. NPE based batteries should also exhibit a significantly higher energy density over existing batteries. Finally, the batteries are expected to only loose about five percent of their capacity after a thousand cycles. On the downside, NPE batteries are expected to require a longer charge time than lithium-ion batteries. Even with this short coming there are likely to be plenty of products that will be able to take advantage of this new technology. And if nothing else, it is good to see that there is plenty of innovation happening on the battery front as well.

Now and then a company comes along that is developing a technology so unique that it has the potential of completely changing the way we think about how things get done. Case in point, Kovio Inc., a semiconductor startup based out of Milpitas, California. Several years after spinning out from the MIT Media Laboratory, the company has been pursuing printed silicon electronics and slowly but surely the hard work seems to be bearing fruit. Back in October, Kovio announced the world’s first printed silicon RFID platform for item-level intelligence, which utilized printed ICs operating at 13.56 MHz, that containied 128 bits of read-only memory as well as an integrated capacitor. In July of this year, the company was able to raise an additional $20 million in Series E venture capital funding from a myriad of Venture Capitalists (VCs), to begin volume shipments of their RF Barcodes which can be integrated into various consumer products such as nutrition information on food items, tickets, and so on. In addition, Kovio has been collecting awards left and right, including the 2009 Red Herring 100 North America and IDTechEx Printed Electronics Awards.

The advantages of printed silicon are numerous, including lower fabrication costs as opposed to traditional silicon technology, high customization potential, and a rapid time to market. Obviously, performance levels are not comparable to high-end silicon processes, but the innovation here is Kovio’s proprietary silicon based ink, depicted below,  and process technology that makes low-cost printed silicon based products a reality, such as the RF barcodes that the company is currently pursuing. Software developers are probably licking their chops, thinking about all the applications they will be able to build on top of the printed silicon once it penetrates the market.

But what if this was only the beginning? What if a few years from now anyone could design a basic system and print it as easily as one can print a piece of paper today? If a substantial amount of copies were needed, one could take the design to a place similar to a printing/copying center, such as FedEx Office, and make a few thousand copies. Only for millions of copies one would need to consider foundries. Let’s be honest, most designs do not need to operate in the GHz realm. If the common person could sit down, design a system, and bring it into the real world by simply printing it, similar to how graphics artist and designers work today, the creativity of individuals would be unleashed. Just maybe this would lead to a semiconductor renaissance where the actual design and function would matter more than the latest process node on which it was fabricated.

Last week was definitely not a good one for semiconductor startups. Every other day an announcement appeared proclaiming the end for one startup or another. There was Evident Technologies, a company that specialized in Quantum Dot Products and Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), which filed for Chapter 11.Then there was CSwitch, a startup specializing in configurable switch array chips for next generation networks, which seized operations according to sources. And finally, there was MetaRAM, a company that worked on quadrupling the DRAM capacity of existing systems using existing DIMMs.

We profiled MetaRAM in March of last year, shortly after the company emerged from stealth mode. It was backed by several prominent venture capital firms including: Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Storm Ventures, and Intel Capital. This just shows you that having prominent VC backing is not a guaranteed indicator of success. Already back then we had a couple of concerns regarding the MetaRAM technology: First, with increasing DRAM frequency, how long would MetaRAM be able to hide the latency of their chipset via clever buffering of reads and writes? Second, it was inevitable that memory controllers would enable support for ever larger amounts of memory, possibly making MetaRAM technology irrelevant? Whether any of these was the actually reason for the company ceasing operations we might never know. The company’s website seems to be down, and as far as I’m aware nobody has been able to reach any of the company representatives for an official comment.

The issues that lead to troubles for the other two semiconductor startups are somewhat clearer. CSwitch was simply unable to raise another $10 million in funding in order to bring its chips into mass production. The company is currently negotiating to sell its assets, and with some luck we might see the technology hit the market yet in the same way Ambric’s technology did earlier this year. Evident’s issue was a bit different, in that the company announced this it was filing for bankruptcy protection due to exorbitant costs associated with a patent infringement case that was brought against the company by a large California-based life science company. The good news here is that while in Chapter 11, Evident intends to continue their research and development, as well as commercialization of their technology.