Startup Blurbs

Earlier this week, WiSpry received an additional $7 million of Series B funding, brining the company’s total funding to $18 million so far. Based out of Irvine, California, WiSpry is a fabless semiconductor startup focused on the mobile communications market. In particular, the company has developed programmable radio frequency (RF) products which are made possible through the company’s patented integration technique of micro-electro-magnetic-systems (MEMS) devices with typical industry RF-CMOS flows. This in turn enables MEMS to be manufactured in regular IC foundries rather than in specific MEMS foundries as is done typically. For those not familiar with this technology, MEMS are microscopic devices that utilize moving parts to accomplish mechanical actions. Many companies utilize MEMS in their products, for example, TI the largest MEMS manufacturer in 2006 utilized them in their DLP chips, while Canon and HP utilized them in their printers. The real benefit of WiSpry’s approach is that it enables really tight integration of micro-electronics with micro-mechanical devices, effectively enabling complete system-on-a-chip solutions. According to the company, their process can be integrated with active silicon and is process agnostic, thus able to work with CMOS, SiGe, BiCMOS and GaAs. Currently, WiSpry’s product line is a family of RF-MEMS tunable digital capacitors that are offered in networked configurations. These capacitors operate similarly to regular parallel-plate capacitors, however the distance between the plates is tunable due to MEMS technology, and as such the capacitance can be varied. This product line is initially targeted at wireless devices for antenna tuning and filter applications. Further down the line WiSpry envisions the integration of their technology into transceivers, low-noise amplifiers and power amplifiers. The important part here is for the integration of the MEMS not to slow-down the production of the rest of the ICs significantly, or else it might become more cost effective for companies to do the production of these two separately. However, if this challenge can be overcome and given the fact that the market for wireless devices which require ever tighter integration of components is still growing, the market opportunities for WiSpry seem lucrative.

Memory capacity is one of those things that developers seem to have an infinite appetite for. How programs worked in the old days with a few Kbytes of memory is almost a mystery, but then again the type of information that is being crammed into memory for the sake of performance today is significantly different than even a decades ago. Yet, one has to wonder if programmers have gotten a ted lazy after trading in assembly skills for compiler optimizations. Regardless, MetaRAM, a two year old startup out of San Jose, California that emerged from stealth-mode a week ago is poised to make many new friends with their recent announcement of being able to quadruple the DRAM capacity of existing systems using existing DIMMs. Backed by several prominent venture capital firms including Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Storm Ventures, and Intel Capital, and led by Fred Weber who led the development of the Opteron processor at AMD, MetaRAM developed what they call MetaSDRAM technology.

As shown above, MetaRAM’s trick is a chipset that sits between the system memory controller and the actual DRAM. This chipset, which consists of an access manager chip, either the AM150 or AM160, and several flow controller chips, FC540, enables support for up to 16GB DIMMs without the need for any other hardware or software changes within the system. These chips work in tandem at speeds of up to 667 MT/s while being transparent to the host memory controller as well as the DRAMs.  This is definitely a clever trick, and as long as it does not inhibit the operating frequency it is a great way for upgrading current systems without having to re-work any additional hardware. Two questions emerge however that the company will have to address in the future: First, as the operating frequency of DRAMs increases, how long will MetaRAM be able to hide the latency of their chipset via clever buffering of reads and writes? Second, it is inevitable that memory controllers in the future will enable support for ever larger amounts of memory, is it possible therefore that at some point the amount of memory on a memory module will simply be limited by the physical integration limit, rather than by the controller capability? But for now things seem to be well at MetaRAM; several vendors have announced products based on MetaRAM’s chipsets and the company has also several open positions for those looking for something new to work on. If you want to find out a little bit more about the company’s co-founder and CEO head on over to The Register, where you can find a very interesting interview with Fred Weber which covers his career from the early days at Harvard, through NextGen, AMD, and finally MetaRAM.

Many companies have promised to take on Intel in the x86 space, but not many have fared very well, either going under or being scooped up Intel’s arch rival AMD. Today, News.com posted an interesting article about a Santa Clara, California based startup named Montalvo Systems that is supposedly designing multi-core chips for the ultraportable and notebook spaces. Don’t bother checking their web site-unless you are looking for a job in California, Colorado, or India, for other than that it has absolutely no product or company information. The Register reported in 2006 that former Transmeta CEO Matt Perry assumed the CEO position at Montalvo during that year. However, the News.com article yields several new insights, such as the fact that Peter Song, who previously founded MemoryLogix, is Montalvo’s chief architect, and that Peter Glaskowsky is their chief system architect. The company has so far raised $73 million through several venture capital firms. The currently published patent applications do not reveal much about the processor as they are focused mainly on power conservation via a buffer/mini-cache that either reduces DRAM accesses or provides information when the processor is in a low-power state and thus not available. The two patent applications can be found here and here. I was hoping of finding one of the Montalvo guys at the ISSCC conference this week in hope of obtaining some additional information; however, with thousands of engineers running around this proved to be a futile attempt. As such, unless Montalvo makes a public announcement later this year or emerges from stealth mode, it will be hard to make any comparisons to Transmeta or to assess the company’s chances.