ChipCrunch.com

At least this is what a recent article written by Jim Truley for the Linley Group suggests. Titled “How to Blow $100 Million” the article examines on a high level the costs associated with starting and running a new semiconductor venture through the first few years. The estimates presented in the article are focused on a startup which intends produce an entire SoC instead of single-function chip, and as such the rule of thumb estimate of about a $100 million seems inline with what has been suggested by VCs in one of our previous posts. Most semiconductor startups we have covered over the last few years don’t come close to this number, so I still would contend that it might be a bit on the high side. Then again, many of these startups are focused on SoC that are either limited in scope, or single-function chips that more often than not are either mixed signal ICs or digital implementations of analog circuits, which might explain the funding discrepancy. Additionally, raising too much capital initially can also be problematic, for it is not desirable to sell off too much of the company at a low valuation. Thus, it might be that these companies are hoping to raise more money in the future if things go well. Either that, or like Jim suggests the funding requirements by these companies are severely underestimated.

Over the last few months there has been a lot of debate regarding x86 vs. ARM, be in on the servers side or the mobile side. There were many rumors and speculations about when major manufacturer might bring ARM based servers to market first. With nothing concrete materializing, the focus then shifted to startups: First, with SeaMicro out of Santa Clara, CA unveiling a 512-way Atom-based server in mid June. Just a month later an Austin, TX based startup named Smooth-Stone announced that the company secured $48 million in funding in order to develop ARM based servers to the market. With all this x86 vs. ARM talk, it is really not surprising that the PowerPC guys via Power.org decided to go on the offensive – after all, with many companies in their camp and a roadmap offering a large variety of processors and solutions, they rightly belong in the conversation as well.

Most recently, the Power.org alliance released their updated Power Architecture 2010 Roadmap presentation. The presentation is rather high-level, listing all the corporate members and the usual target markets: consumer, automotive and industrial, high-performance computing, general compute, and communications. Without any accompanying explanation, the actual silicon roadmap shown below is nothing more than a pretty bar chart.

Thankfully, the guys at the Microprocessor Report (MPR) recently published an article titled “PowerPC Covers the Highs and Lows” which can be viewed without a subscription courtesy of Power.org. Not only does this article give a brief history review of the RISC architecture evolution, but it steps through the most recently released roadmap on a company by company basis, briefly discussing some of the newer solution each has to offer. Further, it touches on the licensing differences between MIPS, ARM, and PowerPC and how this translates into the marketplace: explaining for example why there are so few original PowerPC and ARM designers, as opposed to original MIPS designers. A brief and concise read, but on point most of the time and worth a look for sure – if solely for making sense of the published roadmap.

It is not a secret that as of late the PowerPC architecture has found most success in the communication and automotive sectors. And as such, another article recently published by Fawzi Behmann, the Director of Marketing for Power.org, titled “Power Architecture Enabled Differentiated Solution for LTE” tries to make the point as to why the Power architecture is optimal for this space. Personally, I found the article somewhat lacking on the Power architecture side, but at least several of the growth and adoption statistics regarding Long Term Evolution (LTE) where interesting – particularly the number of operators, namely 110, in  48 countries, that have committed to LTE. Many of which will deploy the technology in the 2011 timeframe. A far more interesting presentation was given by Fawzi at the end of 2009 at the Asia Power Architecture Conference Series titled “Power Architecture Differentiation.” It has more detail and several accompanying visuals that make it a much more interesting read.

Will all of this help Power.org make the Power architecture more of a conversation topic? Only time will tell. The alliance consists of several very established members and the product mix they offer together is a very comprehensive one. However, for now the guys at MPR sum it up best: “PowerPC straddles both worlds quite successfully, covering the high end and the low end. It’s a shame that it has no mainstream PC or desktop computer to call its town, but powering the world’s fastest supercomputers should be consolation enough.”

Always on WiFi surely sounds good – as long as you are not running off a battery that is. As it turns out, this adage does not need to be true and Nanoradio is making it happen. Based out of Kista, Sweden this fabless semiconductor startup has been working on low power solutions for wireless networking since 2004. We first encountered the company on the emerging technology startup list back in 2007. Since then, several of the company’s solutions have been featured in mobile devices by major OEMs such as Samsung. Currently, the company has a workforce numbering about 60 people and also has several vacancies in Embedded Software, Digital Design/Verification, as well as Layout areas – if Sweden is your thing. More recently the company was able to raise an additional €10 Million in venture capital for growth expansion from existing investors including Viking Venture,  Creandum, Ferd, Industrifonden, Nordic Venture Partners, Innovacom, and Teknoinvest.

Nanoradio currently has solutions targeting three distinct market segments: Wireless LAN (WLAN) Products, Mobile Phone Products, and Multimedia Products. For Multimedia products the company offers the NRG731 802.11b/g single chip system in package (SiP). It supports coexistence with Bluetooth chips, contains 2G and 3G filters, and supports WPA, WPA2, and WiFi Multimedia (WMM). It also supports Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) which allows access to GSM and GPRS via unlicensed spectrums, including Bluetooth and 802.11. For Mobile phone products Nanoradio offers the NRX700/2 chipset which consist of the NRX511 2.4GHz RF chip and the NRX701 Baseband/MAC chip, and is optimized for embedded solutions. Finally, for WLAN products the company offers the NGR800 SiP which is a Wireless LAN/Bluetooth combo. There are also several development and evaluation boards that can be purchased with each of the above, in case you want to play around with them a bit, although the prices are not publically disclosed. More recently, Nanoradio announced the launch of what the company refers to as the Eco-Fi products family, with the NRX600/605. The new Eco-Fi family of products is intended to complement the previously mentioned NRX700/2 by integrating the power amplifier and power management functionality onto a single chip that allows for complete WiFi functionality with an area of less than 40mm2.

All this sounds great, but you might ask why one would trust a startup out of Sweden with one's next mobile product. Well, Nanradio’s President & CEO, Tord Wingren, is a rather accomplished fellow having been: the CEO of Ericsson at one point, a core member of the team that invented Bluetooth, and last but not least the head of Samsung R&D in London – so when he decides to head up a startup he probably has some notion about what he is doing.

We first encountered Tilera back in '07 when the company made the EETimes emerging startup list. We caught up with the company later that year when they revealed the Tile64 processor. The following year the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) recognized Tilera with the startup to watch award. Over the last couple of years Tilera has definitely not been standing still nor resting on their laurels. In '09 they announced the Tile-Gx family of processors, which features devices that range from a relatively humble 16 cores to a massive 100 cores. These devices also go a step further than the company’s previous efforts in terms of system on a chip (SOC) design integrating 64-bit DDR3 interfaces, plenty of Gigabit-Ethernet (GbE) MAC interfaces and hardware encryption and compression support. A high-level view of the Tile-Gx is shown in the figure below. Tilera expects to start sampling these devices, implemented in 40nm technology, later this year. Further out, in the 2013 timeframe, Tilera expects to offer a 200-core processor version, codenamed Stratton, which will be implemented in 28nm technology.

All this progress has not gone unnoticed and earlier this year the company received an additional $25 million in series-C funding, bringing the total venture capital raised to $64 million. Several new strategic investors joined in this round, including Broadcom, Quanta Computer and NTT Financing. The newly raised capital is to be used to broaden the product portfolio and to expand sales activities. With Quanta as an investor the company also went to town on branching out into the cloud computing space. In June the two companies jointly announced a new Quanta cloud server product that packed a stunning 512 cores into a single 2U form factor server while staying under 400 watts. This particular product featured the TilePro64 processors, however, with the future Tile-Gx and Stratton products, companies could potentially offer 20,000 cores per server rack in 2011, and up to 40,000 cores par rack by 2013, respectively. These are mind numbing numbers indeed; it will be interesting to see how Tilera’s proprietary Dynamic Distribute Cache (DDC) which allows for a fully coherent shared cache across an arbitrary array of tiles (processor + switch), as well as the Intelligent Mesh (iMesh) non-blocking cut-through network will scale with the ever increasing core count. With Tilera’s ambitious roadmap and the recent announcement from startup SeaMico touting a 512 processor Intel Atom based product, the server space has suddenly become very interesting again.