These days everything seems to be centered on portable and wireless technologies. There are a great number of startups specializing in RF technologies, digital amplifiers, and software defined radio. Even wireless power harnessing for low power applications has appeared on the horizon. With 3G, 4G, WiMAX, Ultra Wide Band, Wireless USB, and beyond it seems that the entire wire-line infrastructure that has been built over the last century at a cost of billions, if not trillions, of dollars, might become obsolete. Given the media’s infatuation these days with everything wireless, someone not well versed in the data communication business can easily be mislead to believe that wire-line obsoleteness is inevitable. Thus, when a startup appears and claims that it has developed technology that will revolutionize the speed and distances at which wire-line networks can operate, one quickly takes notice. Enter LightWaves, an equipment startup that originated out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa and has recently moved its headquarters to Austin, TX. The company has developed what it calls TimeFlux technology, which enables data transmission on any wire type at greater speed than any other currently existing technology. I recently had the pleasure of meeting with Drew Childress, LightWaves’ Vice President of Business Development and Marketing, to speak a little bit about LightWaves. During our meeting Drew was kind enough shed some light on the company’s TimeFlux technology and data communication businesses in general. What follows below is a summary of our conversation.

ChipCrunch:
"Cedar Rapids, Iowa is a rather unusual place for a startup to emerge from?"
Drew Childress:
"That’s true. But what you might not know is that Cedar Rapids actually has the highest number of engineers per capita of any major metropolitan area in the US with Rockwell Collins  being the major employer."

ChipCrunch:
"I didn’t know that. What prompted the company to move its headquarters to Austin, TX recently?"
Drew Childress:
"Although we have plenty of EEs in Cedar Rapids, what we lacked were people that really understood telecom, and people that wanted to be engaged in startups. Additionally, when talking to Venture Capitalists, they very much considered Cedar Rapids a fly over zone, meaning, they urged us to move to an area where both talent and VCs were more readily available."

ChipCrunch:
"Obviously you had other choices than Austin, such as Boston or San Jose. So why did you choose Austin?"
Drew Childress:
"Boston seems rather more focused on the medical startups. San Jose and Austin both feature a lot of electrical engineering talent, however being from the mid-west we felt a lot more at home in Austin. As a matter of fact, if you could pick up Austin and place it somewhere in the mid-west it would fit right in, it is very much a mid-west kind of town. Additionally, other factors such as the cost of living and receptiveness of VCs also influenced our decision. "

ChipCrunch:
"What are the plans for your site in Cedar Rapids?"
Drew Childress:
"We’re definitely keeping the Cedar Rapids site. We currently employ several outstanding engineers there who did not want to relocate down to Austin. Further, we lease a lot of land up there. Land we most likely could not afford down here. We have over five miles of buried wire up there and as such, unlike other companies which rely on simulations to test their theories, we are able to test everything on actual wires. "

ChipCrunch:
"Your company web-site is rather vague on how many employees you currently have, how much funding you have received and from whom, and so on. Can you elaborate?"
Drew Childress:
"Sure. We currently employ sixteen people almost all of whom are electrical engineers. We just recently hired three engineers in Austin, and plan to hire an additional eight or so throughout the year. We have had several rounds of funding in which we were able to raise a total of 16 million. We’ve been able to use that money to run the company for about five years, so we are very conservative cash wise. We are currently working on Round D for our funding."

ChipCrunch:
"With the economy being as it is, do you have any concerns about raising more money?"
Drew Childress:
"Not really. If you have a promising technology that can solve some real problems, there is still plenty of money out there. On a related note, an interesting thing about the economy is that the demand for home services such as internet and cable TV tends increase when times are bad. People spend more time at home and look for cheaper entertainment alternatives to going out."

ChipCrunch:
"Now to the real question. Everybody seems to be enamored with wireless these days. So why do you believe that wired is the way of the future?"
Drew Childress:
"If you understand data communications and the industry, you will quickly come to understand that in the industry nobody believes in wireless for large data transfers. In order to deliver IPTV or related video services you need high quality, low jitter and low latency. In other words, you need guaranteed quality of service. A customer might tolerate mediocre video quality on a small portable device screen, but when the same customer watches content on a big screen television the quality being delivered better be top notch or the customer will be very unhappy. You can look at air as one large coaxial cable where all the wireless devices share bandwidth, and while this will work, the throughput will suffer and so will the content quality that is being delivered."

ChipCrunch:
"Why not buffer the content then? For example, the same way that providers such as  Netflix do before streaming a movie?"
Drew Childress:
"Buffering is certainly a solution, if you only want to watch a specific stream. What happens when you want to browse channels? You can’t expect the consumer to wait several seconds while switching channels. Nor can you expect them to have enough storage space and bandwidth to buffer all of the channels simultaneously. And to complicate things even further, bandwidth requirements will only increase from here on. 3D television is coming down the pipes and that by itself will double the required data rates."

ChipCrunch:
"Ok. So now that we have an idea about the problems, what do you guys bring to the table to solve them?"
Drew Childress:
"We have developed a new wire-line technology for home networking that we call TimeFlux. TimeFlux works on any type of wire and at speeds significantly faster than anything that is currently available. The type of wiring and quality of wiring is unique in every house, and as such for us to be able to use any kind of wire and our ability to maintain high throughput even on lower quality wires is a huge advantage. As a matter of fact, just last month we successfully completed a mock home test with a potential customer, and we achieved speeds twice as fast as anything they have ever seen."

ChipCrunch:
"I understand you don’t want to reveal all the details about TimeFlux, but can you expand a little bit on how you are able to achieve these high speeds?"
Drew Childress:
"Sure. But let me first start out by taking a step back and explaining a couple more problems that telecom providers currently face. Many technologies, such as vdsl2 for example, promised 100 Mbps at a range of up to 5000 feet. As these technologies exited the labs, reality quickly kicked in and currently vdsl2 can at best do about 25 Mbps at up to 3000 feet. This shortcoming in performance stems from the fact that current technologies are hitting fundamental physical limits of carrier based modulation schemes, which cannot be overcome by increasing the signal power or by more sophisticated encoding techniques. In the case of vdsl2, as signal power is increased, waves begin jumping off the actual wire resulting in a lack of throughput. What current schemes essentially do is modulate the frequency and multiplex in time. With TimeFlux we do exactly the opposite: we modulate time and multiplex in frequency. Based on the math alone, we are able to achieve twice the throughput of competing technologies simply because we are twice as efficient with bandwidth."

ChipCrunch:
"I can imagine that that there are quite a few companies interested in your TimeFlux technology. How do you intend to bring it to market?"
Drew Childress:
"We are currently designing TimeFlux based products for the commercial market (hotels, hospitals and multi-tenant buildings). Our UltraJack family of wall-mounted network adapters can utilize the existing wiring in these buildings to deliver high quality connectivity throughout the building. Next up will be products for the residential market and we may also offer TimeFlux chipsets a little further down the road."

ChipCrunch:
"Thank you so much for your time and all the information that you shared. Best of luck with TimeFlux and please keep us abreast of any new developments at LightWaves."

As of late it seems we have been busy writing non-stop about semiconductor startups. This of course is a good thing since it shows that even during these gloomy economic times innovation and startups are alive and well. Occasionally through it is interesting to take a step back and look at the bigger picture to see what technologies might be coming down the pipeline. In other words, rather than looking at what a particular startup is doing, look at some of the things that are currently happening in the research community. Lucky for us, MIT, in their latest issue of the Technology Review journal did some of the leg work in their special report titled “10 Emerging Technologies 2009.” The entire report is an interesting read, but from the electronics and computing point of view a few of the sections might be more interesting than others, including:

Racetrack Memory: Memory technology that uses U-shaped magnetic nanowires. Portions of the wires have different polarities which represent 1s and 0s. Spin current can be applied such that the magnetic pattern propagates along the wire, through a point at which it is read. According to the article, data can be written and read in a little less than a nanosecond, which is not quite SRAM speed, but very respectable nevertheless.

HashCache: A hash function algorithm that translates data into a shorter representation which at the same time is the address of the data on the hard disk, thus eliminating a lookup table that is usually needed to look up data associated with a hash key. The idea makes sense. What does not make sense is the comparison table for total cost of a comparable setup: 14 gigabytes of memory for a conventional setup can hardly account for a $2500 price difference, especially with today’s DRAM prices.

Liquid Battery: A battery that is completely composed of liquids. The electrodes consist of molten metals separated by a motel salt. The beauty of the design is that these liquid layers remain separated naturally because of the different densities of the materials. A very unique property of the battery is that when the battery charges or discharges, the electrolytes and electrodes change in volume. Commercialization of this technology is expected within the next five years.

At the beginning of this month eetimes.com updated their silicon 60 list of emerging startups to version 8. Sometimes this update is exciting; introducing us to many new startups we might not have been aware off. Other times, the updates are so minor , that finding any new companies that have joined the list is akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. This time around, eetimes.com did not disappoint tough. The newly published list is full of new startups, which account for over forty percent of the list.  A majority of the new startups are based out of California accounting for 10 of the 25 new additions, however as the list shows, startups can be found all over the world. The new additions to the list are summarized below.

• BeSang Inc. (Beaverton, OR):  3D Integrated Circuits
• BLX IC Design Co. Ltd (Beijing, China): Godson Processor Development
• Boston Power Inc. (Westborough, MA): Rechargeable Lithium Ion Batteries
• BridgeLux Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA): LED Arrays
  
• Celeno Communications Inc. (Ra'anana, Israel): Wi-Fi Chip for HD Networking
• Elastix Corp. (Santa Clara, CA): EDA Tools for Power Consumption
• Element CXI Inc. (Milpitas, CA): Software Defined Hardware
• Field Emission Technologies Inc. (Tokyo, Japan): Nano-Spindt Display
• Fresco Microchip Inc. (Toronto, Canada): RF and Mixed Signal Design
• Gemini Design Technology Inc. (Fremont, CA): Fast Spice Simulator
• Genusion Ltd. (Amagasaki, Japan): eCFlash and B4-Flash Memory
• Gigle Semiconductor Ltd. (Barcelona, Spain): Multimedia Home Networking
• IPtronics A/S (Roskilde, Denmark): Optical Interconnect Silicon
• MimoOn GmbH (Duisberg, Germany): Software Defined Radio Solutions
• Newport Media Inc. (Lake Forest, CA): Digital Audio and Mobile TV
• Nextreme Thermal Solutions Inc. (Durham, NC): Thermal and Power Management
• Nujira Ltd. (Cambridge, England): Power Amplifiers Efficiency
• Percello Ltd. (Ra'anana, Israel): Digital Baseband Solutions
• Quantenna Communications Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA): High-Speed Wireless
• Signet Solar Ltd. (Menlo Park, CA): Affordable Renewable Energy
• SiliconBlue Technologies Corp. (Santa Clara, CA): Low Power FPGAs
• SiOnyx Inc. (Beverly, MA): Shallow Junction Photonics
• Tela Innovations Inc. (Campbell, CA): Lithography
  
• TeraNetics Inc. (Santa Clara, CA): Mixed-Signal IC Design