It seems that at times we go through dry spells with relatively little news relating to semiconductor or chip startups, but then when things do happen they seem to happen all at once. With that said, a lot of news is not necessarily good news, as is the case with Ambric Inc. According to this eetimes.com article, the company failed to close on a $15 million round of series C funding, and had no choice but to close down. We wrote about Ambric last December, and found their software approach as well as the proposed Am2045 processor quite elegant. The combination of Java for its object-orientation, the Eclipse development framework, and a compiler which translates the code into a native machine language that maps simple objects to single cores and complex objects to multiple cores, seemed particularly promising. Further, according to the eetimes.com article, the company had quite a few design wins particularly in the video processing and medical fields. The additional funding was likely required because the company failed to successfully commercialize the Kerstel prototype chip which they first announced back in 2006. It is very disappointing that the company needed to obtain additional cash to stay afloat in this less than startup friendly environment, yet at the same time surprising that VCs decided to pull the plug on what at least externally seemed like a very promising approach. Hopefully, some more well-funded company or a wealthy individual out there will find Amric’s ideas interesting enough to buy them and carry them forward – Who knows, Transmeta, a company that a lot of people have written off for a long time now, just got acquired by startup Novafora the other day.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
@icdboss noted, hopefully they will have a better experience dealing with Samsung locally, given the company's large presence in Austin