http://www.epn-online.com/enCopyright 2007 - Reed Business InformationTue, 02 Dec 2008 14:10:39 +0100Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:10:39 +0100EPN Onlinelchevalier@reedbusiness.frlchevalier@reedbusiness.frhttp://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rsshttp://www.epn-online.com/page/new59001/reportage-epn-s-rising-stars-part-ii-.htmlnew59001Middle East Siano Mobile Silicon (Israel) Established in June, 2004, Siano develops highly integrated silicon receivers for the mobile-TV market. Using propriety algorithms in low-power design, it has produced compact, power-efficient, mixed-signal solutions for wireless, battery-operated devices, addressing the needs for fast hand-offs and sustained connectivity. Its SMS1010 multi-band, multi-standard mobile-TV receiver chip has been selected by Taiwanese consumer-electronics OEM BenQ to allow television functionality to be added on to the company's 3G and 2.5G phones. Siano cooperates with a number of industry ecosystem partners in the middleware, software, and application-processor sectors. Its recent collaboration with Vishay on an antenna chip solution received several awards. Headquartered in Netanya, Israel, Siano currently has offices in Korea, China and Taiwan. The firm is backed by Jerusalem Venture Partners and Walden, and its board of director includes former Infineon CEO Ulrich Schumacher. 31917 Dubai Circuit Design (United Arab Emirates)Based in the Dubai Silicon Oasis technology complex, Dubai Circuit Design is a dedicated IC design centre that was established in 2007. It looks to support the large number of global IDMs now taking up residency in the area. With a staff of 20 employees it aims to facilitate the sharing of advanced design methodologies and to offer end-to-end design services.31958 Asia InSilica (India)The Indian semiconductor design industry is estimated to reach $43 billion by 2015, almost ten times what it has been until recently. In addition, the subcontinent now has a series of foundry firms and a growing number of fabless semiconductor manufacturers. Bangalore's InSilica is possibly the jewel in this crown. It produces high-value/high-volume ASIC devices and standard SoC (System-on-Chip) solutions. The company has just obtained second-round funding of $18 million - to add to the $10 million initial funding it received two years back - with top venture-capital firms Intel Capital, Crossbow Ventures, and NewPath, as well as contract manufacturer Flextronics all contributing. Among its early successes has been the INS-3510 image processor, which enables 5Mpixel digital-still-camera-class capabilities to be realised in lower cost mobile phones. It includes features such as AATM (advanced adaptive tone mapping) to ensure colour correctness in a variety of lighting sources, as well as auto exposure, auto white balance, and user-selectable multipoint focus.31913 Ittiam Systems (India)Also headquartered in Bangalore, Ittiam Systems is actively engaged in developing signal-processing-based products. The company is focussed on key DSP sectors such as wireless, wire-line, speech/audio, and imaging/video. The systems it produces are implemented as floating- or fixed-point C-language models, optimised assemblies on multiple processing platforms, synthesisable HDL, or reference boards. In December 2007, Ittiam was among the companies selected as a finalist for the Red Herring "Global 100". It has for the last 12 months been collaborating with DSP supremo Texas Instruments to produce audio and video codecs to support the eXpressDSP digital media platform. These codecs have been validated for use within the DaVinci multimedia technology environment. 31914 AMEC (China)Shanghai-based Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (AMEC) looks to develop a new breed of high-performance semiconductor-processing and wafer-fabrication solutions that will enable chip manufacturers to increase productivity and reduce costs at next-generation process nodes. Established in 2004, the company's management team is made up of former IBM and Applied Materials employees. AMEC has raised an impressive $50 million of investment to date, with financial support from a consortium made up of Walden International, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Goldman Sachs. Its Chinese R&D and manufacturing units are supported by sales/marketing operations in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and the USA.31915 Shanghai Jade (China)Shanghai Jade is fabless semiconductor company headquartered at the Zhangjiang high-tech park. It designs and markets multimedia SoC chips for global mobile-communications and consumer-electronics applications. The company was founded by Silicon Valley veteran Dr Jack He Ouyang in the spring of 2003 to produce high-performance, cost-effective and differentiable SoC solutions. It launched the A100 multimedia only a few months ago. This device integrates two ARM7 cores and a complex FFT processor, as well as 512kbytes of high-speed on-chip memory, avoiding the requirement for an external memory. Shanghai Jade has built alliances with leading IP vendors, foundries, mobile manufacturers, embedded software providers, and EDA firms including Microsoft, TSMC, ARM, Cadence, Synopsys, Micron and Nokia. In 2006, it was singled out as the nation's most promising technology company by the Fortune China magazine. In 2006 it was one of the finalists in Red Herring's "Top 100 Private Companies in Asia". The following year it was nominated the "Start-up of the Year" by EE Times China.31916 Oceania BluGlass (Australia)Antipodean start-up BluGlass has developed an innovative technology, based on the low-temperature growth of nitride-based films, for the production of GaN (gallium nitride) semiconductors, allowing a reduction in the manufacturing costs of high-brightness LEDs. While traditional methods for growing semiconductor films rely on temperatures of above +1000°C, BluGlass' remote plasma chemical vapour deposition technique uses significantly lower temperature levels. This technique allows semiconductors to be produced on a wider range of materials, dispensing with the need to use toxic ammonia gas and replacing it with inert and abundant nitrogen. This approach to depositing GaN also allows LED manufacturers to produce less costly light-emitting devices in a more environmentally sensitive way. It was awarded a $5 million AusIndustry grant from the Australian Government in the autumn of 2007 to help with the commercialisation of its expertise. In early 2008, BluGlass opened a state-of-the-art fabrication plant in New South Wales, and a second one is already under construction in Ireland. 31918 North America Achronix (USA)Founded in 2004, Achronix specialises in the design of multi-gigahertz and extreme-environment FPGA devices. Thanks to innovative semiconductor architectures, the company has been able to utilise commercially available low-cost CMOS fabrication processes to provide high-performance programmable solutions that can operate anywhere between -260 and +130°C and are radiation hardened. Its flagship Ultra line of high-speed FPGA products is capable of operating at close to 2.2GHz in high-reliability applications such as space and aeronautics, offering a less costly alternative to designing an ASIC-based solution. Among the firm's investors are New York-based venture-capital firm New Science Ventures, and Battery Ventures. Eight months ago, the company began collaboration with avionics leader BAe Systems to develop a high-performance radiation-hardened reconfigurable FPGA solution based on a 150nm process and the Achronix high-performance FPGA technology. Achronix has also entered into technology partnerships with EDA heavyweights Mentor Graphics and Synplicity - now part of Synopsis-  to produce comprehensive FPGA design environments to support these products. 31924 Tilera (USA)Founded in late 2004 and headquartered in San Jose, California, Tilera is a fabless semiconductor company producing scalable multi-core embedded processors. Its Tile processors are based on an innovative mesh architecture, which eliminates the on-chip bus interconnects that normally have to flow between cores, replacing them with a switch on each processor core, which are networked together. It can potentially scale up to levels where hundreds of full-featured cores are on a single chip. The distributed nature of the iMesh architecture provides strong processing performance, combined with power efficiency and programming flexibility. The company launched its first product, the Tile64 processor, last summer. Running at up to 866MHz, it has a PCI-Express and multiple 10Gbit Ethernet interfaces. Tilera has been bankrolled by Bessemer Ventures, Walden, Columbia Capital and VentureTech. Eight months ago, Tilera was one of the firms nominated for the Fab-less Semiconductor Alliance's (FSA) "Start-Up to Watch" award.31925 Dust Networks (USA)The utilisation of "smart dust" has gained considerable media attention in recent years, and Dust Networks, which was founded back in 2002, has taken this technology from being a nice Powerpoint presentation into a commercially viable business. Its SmartMesh embedded wireless-sensor-networking products are suitable for use in monitoring and control systems found in the harshest of industrial environments. Each of the sensor nodes - or motes - links up with its neighbours through a mesh network, and though each has limited power and transmission range, when assembled together they can form a powerful sensory entity. Continuous connections and reconfiguration around any broken or blocked paths means that a network can still operate even when a node breaks down or a connection is lost. The sensors themselves can be cheap, expendable, and tiny in size. SmartMesh-enabled solutions are already being used in a range of applications including process monitoring, condition monitoring, asset management, environmental, health and safety monitoring, and energy management. The company claims that the technology can reduce the cost of installing sensors by a factor of ten. It has gained a lot of traction within the industrial market. "Most wireless infrastructure solutions don't address both sides of the equation," notes Steve Toteda, vice president of product management and marketing. "They can transmit data without the communication wires, but they are still shackled by the need for power wires." Among the blue-chip firms that Dust Networks does business with are Emerson and General Electric. It is funded by Foundation Capital, Crescendo, IVP and Cargill. 31928 Toteda - Dust Networks  Quorum Systems (USA)Located in San Diego, California, Quorum creates multi-standard, single-chip RF transceivers. It has patented a portfolio of hardware and software IP that encompasses 2.5G, 3G, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Its Sereno QS3200 high-performance, low-power, multi-mode RF transceiver is a TD-SCDMA/ HSPDA/WCDMA/GSM/GPRS/EDGE/Quad-band solution that looks to save PCB real estate and slash bill of materials costs in the process. It can replace up to four chips from the radio design, without the need for implementing expensive modules The transceiver is implemented in bulk CMOS and integrates six LNAs, and it does not require external baluns. Using the company's proprietary digital transmit architecture removes the need for external transmit SAWs. Investors include Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners, Crescendo Ventures, and Enterprise Partners. 31929 Leadis Technology (USA)Leadis, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, has aspirations to become a big hitter in the analogue and mixed-signal sector. Founded back in 2000, it is the oldest member of our collection of emerging companies. The firm turns out LED- and colour-display-driver ICs addressing the mobile space, and thanks to a series of well-timed acquisitions can today offer codec and power-management solutions. The company now makes integrated handset codecs with built-in headphone amplifiers and FM transmitters, allowing lower power consumption and fewer external components in characteristically footprint-critical designs. Playing in a sector that isn't about having just one product that is sold in big volumes but having a large number of decent-volume products, it does appear that Leadis is starting to reach a stage of critical mass now, and this could allow it to become a major player. As well as its North American presence, it has operations in China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.31930 Black Sand (USA)Black Sand is the latest fabless semiconductor firm to come out of Austin, Texas. The company was established in 2005 by tech veterans Dave Pietruszynski, Jim Nohrden and Susanne Paul, who boast a combined resume that includes time with Freescale, Silicon Labs, Cirrus Logic, and Bell Labs, as well as academic accolades from MIT and Berkeley. It is funded by Austin Ventures and Northbridge Venture Partners, it drew in $8.2 million in its first round. Its focus is on developing mixed-signal technology that lower costs and raises performance in portable wireless designs.31931 SiBeam (USA)SiBeam came into being in the autumn of 2004 and is the brainchild of a group of researchers from Berkeley who developed techniques to perform real-time, non-line-of-sight beam steering. The firm's Omnilink60 WirelessHD chip-set solution is capable of supporting speeds of 60GHz on CMOS, rather than more costly SiGe or GaAs. This technology will automatically find the bounce route available to allow the signal to be transmitted. Financial backing from New Enterprise Associates, US Venture Partners, and Foundation Capital, has brought over $35 million to date. It has earned "Start-Up to Watch" from the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) and EE Times magazine. Omnilink60 collected the Best of Innovations Award in the enabling technologies category at the 2007 CES Innovation Awards.31934 Fresco Microchip (Canada)Ontario-based Fresco Microchip was founded in 2004, backed by Celtic House and Ventures West, and looks to bring together advanced RF, data-conversion and DSP technologies to tackle the challenges facing the future of television. Its agileDSP signal-processing technology can create a universal legacy demodulation solution in low-cost CMOS. Sporting this architecture, the FM2050 low-power, single-chip demodulator solution supports DVB-T as well as universal analogue - NTSC, PAL and SECAM - television signals, allowing the transition to digital TV to take place in a seamless fashion. The device looks to bring together universal legacy video/audio demodulation, digital video demodulation, and IF processing into a single piece of silicon. 31936Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:00:00 +0100