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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.

Jeff Immelt, GE’s chairman and chief executive, has been one busy guy as of late, if not with actual work then at least with giving speeches and publishing articles regarding the future of the Unites States as it pertains to business, technology, and innovation. Consider his latest piece, co-authored with John Doerr who is a partner at Kleiner Perkins Coufield & Byers, that was published the other day in the Washington Post. The article, titled Falling Behind on Green Technology, is more or less a call for the U.S. to get serious about green technology. Two major points are presented: First, the U.S. has the top five leading internet technology companies, but when it comes to green technologies the U.S. has only one of the top five wind power producers, one of the top ten solar panel producers, and two of the top ten next generation battery manufacturers. Second, because long-term guidance from policy makers is lacking, and current policy is detrimental to green technology startups, the U.S. is falling behind significantly when compared to other countries, especially China.

Of course, the statistics above might only become a problem if one truly believes that renewable energy is indeed the next big thing - a very hotly contest topic as is evidenced by the number of comments left by readers. One should not really be completely surprised that Jeff keeps pushing green technologies. GE is heavily vested in wind turbines, heavy machinery, and appliances. Each one of these segments is likely to profit significantly from any regulation requiring higher efficiencies - then again maybe profiting handily while cleaning up the environment might not be so bad after all. The article’s introduction of the China scare is also somewhat amusing; after all, the Russian scare during the cold war era seems to have worked wonders for American ingenuity, so maybe all that is needed now is a green war era? All humor aside, it is a brief article so you can consumer it quickly and decide for yourself.

In case you need a longer dose of Jeff Immelt you might be interested in the video below showing the speech he gave when GE announced a new Manufacturing and Software Technology Center outside of Detroit. The speech, titled American Renewal is rather long one coming in just short of 45 minutes. If you don’t have your coffee handy and a comfortable chair, here is quick synopsis: Jeff argues that the U.S. cannot rely on being a service-led and consumption based economy. It needs to be technology based and export that technology. Further, goals need to be set long term in terms of great undertakings and compensation must be adjusted such that people that truly have brains are valued more than bean counters. Jeff proposes a plan that consists of five fronts: First, an increase in R&D spending is needed since technology makes countries and people wealthy in the long term. Second, the U.S. needs to focus on clean energy and affordable healthcare as the engine for future job growth. Third, the U.S. needs to seriously commit to manufacturing and exports, rather than relying on the American consumer to lead the recovery. Fourth, the U.S. should utilize the government as a catalyst for leadership and change through public/private partnerships, while at the same time be cautious about too much regulation that might stifle innovation. And finally, he encourages business leaders to be responsible for the competitiveness of their own country. In addition to all of the above, Jeff encourages those who have capital to invest, for the best time to invest is when it is hard to do so for others. The video is below, so you can watch it and make up your own mind. Regardless, whether you agree with Jeff regarding renewable energy or affordable healthcare, if either of them comes to pass there ought to be plenty of opportunities to capitalize on this for low-power and analog semiconductor startups.

Email spam, comment spam, bot automated user registrations, you name it – are a pest. So far we’ve been pretty lucky with relatively few of these pests taking note of this blog, but as of late there has been a substantial uptick. With ChipCrunch gaining popularity and ever more link-backs from other sites and blogs, this was to be expected. As such we spent this last weekend integrating Captcha protection for new user registration and lost password retrieval. For now we left the contact form unprotected, just in case you need to notify us that there is a problem with the Captcha protection. Big thanks go out to Walter Cederic who wrote the Captcha plugin that we then modified a little to work better with this site.

We also took some time to filter our existing registered user list and remove those that are known to have been created by automated bots. We’re pretty sure we did not remove any real users, but if so please accept our apologies – the process was somewhat manual and most likely not perfect. Since we were already working on the site, we also fixed a couple of small rendering bugs that a few users have reported over time. Hopefully that will lead to a better overall experience for all of you. As always, we are open to any feedback or criticism so please don’t hesitate in contacting us.

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.