Power Management DesignLine |

December 26, 2005

The Creators

EE Times IDs the startups shaping tomorrow's technology

Achronix Semiconductor
Ithaca, N.Y.
www.achronix.com

MISSION
Radiation-hardened FPGAs and ASICs based on synchronous and asynchronous designs with greater than 1-GHz performance and an ability to operate from - 260°C to 130°C.

PRODUCTS
Rad-hard CMOS FPGAs ranging from 700 MHz to 1.2 GHz.

PERSONNEL
Founder and COO John Lofton Holt, founder and CTO Rajit Manohar

ET CETERA
Will release first product, the Achronix Ultra line, with speeds over 1 GHz, in the second quarter. Plans to offer performance well above 1 GHz by mid-2006, opening up previously inaccessible markets for FPGAs.

Ageia Technologies
Mountain View, Calif.
www.ageia.com

MISSION
Dynamic, interactive realism in next-generation games.

PRODUCTS
Ageia PhysX dedicated physics engine and physics-processor bridges allow developers to use active physics-based environments to create a realistic entertainment experience. Coupled with the PhysX software development kit, the processor accelerates universal collision detection, rigid- and soft-body dynamics, fluid dynamics, smart-particle systems, clothing simulation, soft-body deformation with tearing, and brittle fracturing for destruction of objects in gaming environments.

MONEY
More than $38 million in funding from investors including Apex Venture Partners, BA Venture Partners, HIG Ventures, Granite Global Ventures, CID Equity Partners and VentureTech Alliance.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder, chairman and CEO Manju Hegde

Analogix Semiconductor
Santa Clara, Calif.
www.analogix.com

MISSION
Enable new levels of multimedia-system performance by overcoming existing bandwidth and cost limitations.

PRODUCTS
Analog and mixed-signal ICs for multimedia and communications, including HDMI, DisplayPort, backplane, system interconnect and long-range Ethernet PHY devices.

MONEY
More than $25 million in funding from Woodside Fund, DCM-Doll Capital Management, Globespan Capital Partners and IDG Technology Venture.

PERSONNEL
Chairman and CEO Kewei Yang, president and COO Bill Eichen

ET CETERA
Introduced what it calls the first IC designed specifically for the Video Electronics Standard Association's DisplayPort high-definition interface specification, enabling a wide range of source and display devices for both video and audio to be simply and securely connected.

Apache Design Solutions
Mountain View, Calif.
www.apachedesignsolutions.com

MISSION
Advanced physical-design and verification technology and tools that accelerate chip design and guarantee silicon for power, timing and signal integrity in nanometer system-on-chip markets.

PRODUCTS
RedHawk full-chip vectorless dynamic physical power integrity solution, delivering cell-based speed and capacity with Spice-level accuracy; NSpice high-capacity, mixed-domain next-generation Spice for I/O, signal and power integrity of chips and multigigabit systems; PsiWinder Spice-based critical-path and clock network timing-signoff solution for high-performance nanometer designs.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder, chairman and CEO Andrew T. Yang; co-founder and CTO Shen Lin; co-founder Norman Chang

ET CETERA
Kawasaki Microelectronics Inc. will use RedHawk tool for ASIC designs at 130 nanometers and below.

Applied MicroStructures
San Jose, Calif.
www.appliedmst.com

MISSION
Processing solutions and equipment critical to the commercialization of microstructures.

PRODUCTS
MVD100, which provides automatic vapor deposition of organic-source coatings.

MONEY
Series B financing round, led by Sierra Ventures, totaled $8.5 million and included existing investors Compass Technology Partners and Horizon Ventures.

PERSONNEL
President and CEO Jeff Chinn

ET CETERA
Technical advisory board includes UC Irvine professor Abraham Lee, who is researching fluidic-chip processors for the manipulation and self-assembly of biomolecular nanoparticles.

Arithmatica
Menlo Park, Calif.
www.arithmatica.com

MISSION
Using advances in silicon math algorithms to lower costs and power, and increase speed, for math-intensive ICs.

PRODUCTS
CellMath tools improve data path silicon efficiency without requiring any change in design practices.

MONEY
Funded by U.K.-based independent venture capital group Quester.

PERSONNEL
Chairman Dave Burow, co-founder and CEO Tony Curzon Price, co-founder and CTO Sunil Talwar

ET CETERA
R&D facility in Warwick, England, led by Talwar, represents one of the largest dedicated silicon math research groups in the semiconductor design industry. Claims to have delivered more than 50 floating-point modules across many production tapeouts and six critical-path elements for processors in both standard-cell and custom designs, and to have design experience in 130-, 90- and 65-nm process nodes. Arithmatica has applied for 17 patents.

Arteris SA
Paris
www.arteris.net

MISSION
On-chip communications, or network-on-chip (NoC), for next-generation system-on-chip design.

PRODUCTS
Arteris NoC Solution consists of the Danube intellectual-property library and a suite of design tools for configuring and implementing the IP library as synthesizable RTL.

MONEY
Funded by venture capital firms Crescendo Ventures, Techno Venture Management and Ventech.

PERSONNEL
President K. Charles Janac, co-founder and CTO Alain Fanet, co-founder and chief architect Philippe Boucard

ET CETERA
Arteris NoC offering has been shown to operate at better than 750 MHz on a 90-nm process using standard-cell implementation with traditional ASIC design flow.

BlueNote Networks
Tewksbury, Mass.
www.bluenotenetworks.com

MISSION
Session services to drive the convergence of interactive communications with emerging service-oriented architectures.

PRODUCTS
SessionSuite for integrating voice and video with business process applications.

MONEY
Funding from Fidelity Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners

PERSONNEL
Chairman, president and CEO Tom Burkardt; CTO Brian Silver; vice president of engineering Michael Regan

ET CETERA
Founded in January 2005, BlueNote boasts an executive team with combined experience of more than 100 years in high-tech.

BridgeCo AG
Zurich, Switzerland
www.bridgeco.net

MISSION
Processor IC and software platforms for connecting Internet media sources, computers and consumer electronics throughout the home.

PRODUCTS
DM830 processor can access MP3/WMA audio files stored on networked PCs, Internet radio and Internet music-subscription services through residential gateways; DM850 MPU processes protected or unprotected content from a mobile player, storing content on a mobile player with appropriate digital rights management encryption and processing discrete DRM schemes required for access to Internet music services.

MONEY
Investors include Benchmark Capital, Fidelity Ventures, Earlybird, Cipio Partners, Intel Capital.

PERSONNEL
Founder and CTO Christof Heidelberger, CEO Mark McEachen

ET CETERA
BridgeCo and Swiss guitar designer Rolf Spuler have unveiled the FireWireT Guitar, which connects directly to Macs or Windows-based computers, offering musicians unparalleled freedom in audio recording, editing and mixing.

Brion Technologies
Santa Clara, Calif.
www.brion.com

MISSION
Simulation engine to address the related challenges of design, photomask making and wafer printing in semiconductor microlithography.

PRODUCTS
Tachyon RDI 1100, Brion's first product built on the scalable Tachyon platform, can guarantee full-chip verification of reticle enhancement technology and optical proximity correction in 60 minutes.

MONEY
Investors include U.S. Venture Partners, Jafco Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures, WK Technology Fund, JP Morgan and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder and CEO Eric Chen, co-founder and president Jun Ye

ET CETERA
Working on an innovative microlithography aerial image-sensing technology platform that will be capable of capturing full-field in-scanner aerial images at resolution and at the wafer plane for 193-and 248-nm production wafer scanners, under exact production conditions such as illumination scheme, lens settings and stage speed.

Calypto Design Systems
Santa Clara, Calif.
www.calypto.com

MISSION
Bridging the gap between electronic system-level design and integrated-circuits implementation.

PRODUCTS
SLEC sequential equivalency checker improves verification across the system-to-RTL continuum, from transaction-level models to fully timed RTL implementations.

MONEY
Investors include Tallwood Venture Capital, Walden International, Jafco Ventures and Cipio Partners.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder, president and CEO Devadas Varma; co-founder and vice president of engineering Gagan Hasteer

ET CETERA
Technical advisers include Magdy Abadir, manager of global strategy, tools and methodology group at Freescale Semiconductor Inc.'s Networking and Computing Systems Group, and Bruce Beers, former vice president of IBM Microelectronics.

Cambridge Semiconductor
Cambridge, England
www.camsemi.com

MISSION
Single-chip power ICs based on merging MEMS and CMOS silicon-on-insulator technologies to increase the breakdown ability of the power device and to reduce its output capacitance.

PRODUCTS
Intelligent single-chip power ICs based on patented PowerBrane technology are due for market release in 2006.

MONEY
Initially backed with seed investment from the Cambridge University Challenge Fund, the company has since raised about $12.4 million from a syndicate of investors led by 3i. Other backers include Odyssey Ventures, Scottish Equity Partners and TTP Ventures.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder and CTO Gehan Amaratunga, co-founder and director of engineering Florin Udrea, CEO David Baillie

ET CETERA
Company was founded in August 2000 as a venture-backed spinout from the High-Voltage Microelectronics Group at Cambridge University.

Clear Shape Technologies
Sunnyvale, Calif.
www.clearshape.com

MISSION
To "renew the contract" between design and manufacturing by predicting and reducing systematic manufacturing variations and their impact on design.

PRODUCTS
Engaged in technology partnerships with select industry leaders in semiconductor design and manufacturing.

MONEY
Raised $5 million in second funding round in 2005, bringing total funding to more than $10 million. Backers include AsiaTech Management, Intel Capital, KT Venture Group, Telos Venture Partners and U.S. Venture Partners.

PERSONNEL
President and CEO Atul Sharan, chairman and CTO Yao-Ting Wang, vice president of engineering and process technology Fang-Cheng Chang

Commit
Shanghai, China
www.commit.cn/default_en.jsp

MISSION
Create Chinese homegrown intellectual property and develop products for the wireless TD-SCDMA industry.

PRODUCTS
Platform TD-SCDMA; TD-SCDMA/GSM/GPRS dual-mode protocol stack; proprietary development, test environment and tools.

MONEY
Investors consist of 17 enterprises including China Putian Corp., China Academy of Telecommunications Technology, Texas Instruments (China), Nokia (China) Investment Co. Ltd., LG Electronics Inc. and Hyper Market International Ltd.

PERSONNEL
CEO Evan Yu

ET CETERA
Mars, the company's second-generation TD-SCDMA wireless chip set, introduced earlier this year, enabled LG Electronics' first triple-mode phone supporting TD-SCDMA, wideband CDMA and GSM.

ConSentry Networks
Milpitas, Calif.
www.consentry.com

MISSION
To secure enterprise LANs with a purpose-built system that preserves data integrity, ensures network availability and supports regulatory compliance at disruptive price/performance levels.

PRODUCTS
CS1000 and CS2400 secure-LAN controllers; LANShield Silicon Architecture, consisting of a massively multithreaded 128-core CPU, Flow Accelerator and Visualizer ASICs.

MONEY
Raised $31 million in three rounds of funding from venture capital firms Accel Partners, Invesco Private Capital and Sequoia Capital.

PERSONNEL
Chairman and CTO Jeff Prince, president and CEO Tom Barsi, vice president of engineering Sam Farsad

ET CETERA
ConSentry has joined Trusted Computing Group, formed to develop standards for trusted computing and security technologies, and supports the Trusted Network Connect architecture with its Secure LAN Controller product family.

Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems
Foxborough, Mass.
www.cyberkineticsinc.com

MISSION
Products to restore function and to monitor, detect and respond to a variety of neurological disorders by bringing together advances in neuroscience, computer science and engineering.

PRODUCTS
BrainGate Neural Interface System aims to restore functionality for severely motor-impaired individuals using a PC as the gateway; NeuroPort System, which records and monitors brain electrical activity, will be available in a limited market release in early 2006.

PERSONNEL
President and CEO Timothy R. Surgenor, co-founder and chief scientific officer John P. Donoghue, co-founder Nicholas G. Hatsopoulos

ET CETERA
are based on more than 10 years of technology development and neuroscience research at such institutions as Brown University, MIT, Emory University and the University of Utah.

DAFCA
Framingham, Mass.
www.dafca.com

MISSION
Suite of software tools that implement design-for-debug technology.

PRODUCTS
ClearBlue Silicon Debug Platform

MONEY
Funding is from 3iUS, Bay Partners, Individuals' Venture Fund, Kodiak Venture Partners, New Venture Partners, Vista Ventures.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder, president and CEO Peter L. Levin, co-founder and CTO Miron Abromovici

ET CETERA
Formed the Design-for-Debug Consortium (www.designfordebug.org) to meet system-on-chip debug challenges by means of a collaborative approach.

DibCom
Palaiseau, France
www.dibcom.net

MISSION
High-performance chip sets to enable low-power mobile and portable TV reception in mobile applications, including those at speeds exceeding 150 mph.

PRODUCTS
DVB-T/DVB-H demodulator chip sets; DVB-T, DVB-H and analog TV reference designs.

MONEY
Total of $19.4 million raised in 2001-03. Fourth round in 2005 raised $29 million more and added five new investors — Intel Capital, Partech International, 3i, WI Harper and UMC Capital.

PERSONNEL
CEO Yannick Levy, CTO Khaled Maalej

ET CETERA
Partnered with Atelier, a provider of telephony integration solutions for smart phones, to bring advanced hardware and software DVB-H solutions for the creation of mobile-TV-enabled Symbian and Series 60-based mobile phones.

Design of Systems on Silicon SA
Paterna, Spain
www.ds2.es

MISSION
Silicon and software for power line communications that delivers data at up to 200 Mbits/second.

PRODUCTS
DSS9XXX family of PLC ICs; reference designs for user modems and infrastructure equipment; software.

MONEY
Shareholders include local industrialists, national and international blue-chip companies.

PERSONNEL
Chairman and CEO Jorge Blasco

ET CETERA
Supports standardized power line products based on Europe's Opera specification for broadband subscriber services over electrical infrastructure.

Emerging Memory Technologies
Ottawa
www.emergingmemory.com

MISSION
Leading-edge memory design.

PRODUCTS
DRAM, SRAM, pseudostatic RAM, MRAM, embedded DRAM and planar DRAM in processes ranging from 5-micron NMOS to the latest 90-nm 1T metal-insulator-metal logic process.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder, president and CEO Sreedhar Natarajan; co-founder and COO Lluis Paris

ET CETERA
Founded in 2004, EMT opened a design center in Bangalore, India, last summer to fuel growth in the Asia-Pacific region.

PRODUCTS
Transmitters with a range of up to 300 meters in free space; transceivers for mesh-network and ZigBee applications with EnOcean's batteryless sensors.

MONEY
Latest round of funding in March 2005, led by new investor SAM Private Equity, raised $11.9 million for expansion in the United States and to support further miniaturization and integration of its technology in ASICs and MEMS. Shareholders include BayTech Venture Capital, enjoyventure Management, Siemens Technology Accelerator GmbH, Siemens Venture Capital GmbH, Wellington Partners and 3i Group plc.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder and CEO Markus Brehler, co-founder and executive vice president Andreas Schneider, co-founder and CTO Frank Schmidt

ET CETERA
STM250 solar-powered RF magnet-contact radio module eliminates dependence upon batteries, which EnOcean calls the principal deficiency of wireless security systems.

MISSION
Complete semiconductor and modular solutions for digital multimedia products.

PRODUCTS
Chorus FS1010 programmable multimedia processor; T-DMB portable-multimedia chip set; Mercury FS4031 DAB, CD, FM/AM audio reference design.

MONEY
Privately funded company; key shareholders include Quilvest Group, ACT Venture Capital, Apax Partners, Alta Berkeley, BlueRun Ventures, Digital One and Imagination Technologies.

ET CETERA
Roadster T-DMB, a mobile digital television version of the Roadster automotive DAB module, enables the reception of terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasts in vehicles. Initially aimed at car manufacturers in South Korea, where the first commercial T-DMB services were launched by six major broadcasters in the Seoul area.

MISSION
Apply a patented circuit technology and design methodology to deliver high-performance, standards-based interconnect devices for computing, storage and networking applications

PRODUCTS
FM2224, a 24-port 10-Gbit Ethernet switch chip with 24 integrated Xaui serdes interfaces that can be independently configured to operate in 10-Gbit/s, 2.5-Gbit/s and 10/100/1,000 Ethernet modes; FM2112, a 24-port switch chip with eight 10-Gbit Ethernet interfaces and 16 lower-speed interfaces, all of which can be configured to operate in 2.5-Gbit/s and 10/100/1,000 Ethernet modes.

MONEY
Raised $56 million from investors Granite Ventures, Infinity Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Palomar Ventures and Worldview Technology Partners.

PERSONNEL
President and CEO Bob Nunn, co-founder and CTO Uri Cummings, co-founder and vice president of research and development Andrew Lines

ET CETERA
Fulrcum's technology is based on advanced research conducted at Caltech by the company's founding team.

MISSION
Highly disciplined methodology for designing self-timed circuitry that allows commercial exploitation of clockless technology, which promises low power consumption, low electromagnetic emissions and low ground bounce.

PRODUCTS
Standard intellectual-property blocks implemented in self-timed technology, such as the HT80C51 microcontroller core.

MONEY
Handshake operates within the Philips Technology Incubator, a program that strives to turn promising technologies into successful business entities.

ET CETERA
Fabless semiconductor manufacturer Malaysia Microelectronics Solutions will use the HT80C51 8-bit IP core in a new smart-card controller IC.

PRODUCTS
Baseband processor and modem software support HSDPA, UMTS, GSM and Edge multimode capability; Livanto ICE8020 wireless soft-modem IC for mobile-phone and wireless data card applications.

MONEY
Completed a $10 million extension to its 2004 Series B funding round, with funding now totaling $32.5 million. Investors include Accel Partners, Atlas Venture and Benchmark Capital

PERSONNEL
Co-founder, president and CEO Stan Boland; co-founder and vice president of silicon Simon Knowles

MISSION
Tools to design and program using a unified systems-design automation approach combining hardware and software issues.

ET CETERA
Claims its small team — including an engineering office in the U.K. — has more than 200 years of relevant collective experience.

MISSION
Develop and license innovative memory technology for system-on-chip/MPU applications.

PRODUCTS
Z-RAM (zero-capacitor RAM), which harnesses floating-body effect, resulting in a single-transistor cell structure.

MONEY
Funded by leading European and U.S. venture capital firms. The first round of financing in 2003 brought in $6 million. Austin Ventures joined with existing investors to lead a $16 million Series B round of investment.

PERSONNEL
President and CEO Mark-Eric Jones, chief scientist Serguei Okhonin, chairman and CTO Pierre Fazan

ET CETERA
Innovative Silicon has seen memory designs of its ZRAM taped out at 90 nanometers. Intellectual-property adviser Neil Steinberg is a registered U.S. patent attorney who has been admitted to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He is also a member of the Massachusetts and District of Columbia Bars, and the Bar of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

MISSION
Decrease test time and cost by leveraging design-for-test methodologies, such as structural test, which verifies the semiconductor's internal circuits rather than its functional behavior.

MONEY
Raised $16.3 million in Series C financing. Investors include Advantest, CMEA Ventures, HIG Ventures, Hotung Ventures, Palomar Ventures, Storm Ventures, Synopsys SoC Venture Fund and TechFarm Ventures.

PERSONNEL
CEO Paul Sakamoto, founder and CTO Phil Burlison, chief scientist Al Crouch, founder and vice president of software development and applications engineering Ric Dokken

ET CETERA
Has identified Cadence Design Systems, Dynamic Details, Intest, Mentor Graphics and Synopsys as partners.

MISSION
To become the first company to bring holographic data storage technology to market.

MONEY
Investor firms include New Venture Partners, Signal Lake, Hitachi Maxell, Bayer MaterialScience, Madison Dearborn Partners, Newton Technology Partners, Alps Electric, Yasuda Enterprise Development, Japan Asia Investment and Nanotech Partners. B.J. Cassin is among individual investors.

PERSONNEL
Chairman Steve Kitrosser, president and CEO Nelson Diaz, CTO Kevin Curtis, vice president of media development Lisa Dhar

ET CETERA
InPhase was founded in December 2000 as a Lucent Technologies venture, spun out of Bell Labs. Founders include the principal systems and material scientists from Bell Labs who invented the company's core holographic-storage technology.

MISSION
Leading-edge nonvolatile embedded-memory technology, leveraging standard CMOS processes.

MONEY
Founded in 2001 and completed second round of funding in October 2005, with $8.8 million from U.S. Venture Partners, BlueRun Ventures and iGlobe Partners.

PERSONNEL
CEO Bernie Aronson, vice president of product operations Yeng Peng

ET CETERA
Licensed XPM to Zoran. Revealed in November it had completed qualification of its XPM IP on TSMC's 0.18-micron CMOS logic process.

PRODUCTS
Luminescent Explorer, a complete inverse-lithography technology (ILT) capability for small blocks.

PERSONNEL
CEO David Fried, co-founder and CTO Dan Abrams, co-founder and CFO Jack Herrick

ET CETERA
China-based foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. will evaluate Luminescent's ILT products in SMIC's production environment for 65-nanometer and finer process nodes.

PRODUCTS
Now in prototype. Caltech provided initial base of IP and serves as an ongoing R&D partner.

MONEY
Investors include Sevin Rosen Funds, New Enterprise Associates, August Capital, California Institute of Technology and others.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder, president and CEO Alex Dickinson; co-founder, vice president of technology, Cary Gunn; senior vice president, product development, Laszlo Gal

ET CETERA
Sun Microsystems Inc. has chosen Luxtera as a technology partner to develop high-bandwidth, low-latency dense wavelength-division multiplexed optical interconnects.

MISSION
Company has spent five years developing magnetic RAMs in collaboration with the University of Toronto, professor Harry Ruda and Ontario Centers of Excellence Inc.

PRODUCTS
Once fully developed, its 128-bit MRAM will target radio frequency identification tags.

MONEY
Shares trade on the NASD over-the-counter bulletin board. Company reported revenue of $1,633 and net loss of $2.65 million for the nine-month period ended July 31. Accumulated deficit is $53.14 million. Micromem continues to raise capital to fund operations, and garnered $2.11 million in the nine months ended July 31.

PERSONNEL
President and CEO Joseph Fuda, chief technical officer Cynthia Kuper, lead scientist Harry Ruda

ET CETERA
Demonstrated a 1-bit prototype to its board of directors in February.

MISSION
Mitrion virtual processor eases software programming of an FPGA-based acceleration system, making high-performance computing accessible to those with no hardware design experience.

PRODUCTS
Massively parallel soft-core Mitrion virtual processor is available via device-locked license valid for a single FPGA, or floating license valid for any FPGA of the same type. Software development kit includes the Mitrion-C compiler, debugger, simulator and processor configurator tuned to implement the Mitrion virtual processor. A programmer's edition of the SDK is mainly for algorithm development for the Mitrion virtual processor.

MONEY
Founded in 2000, company received $800,000 in seed financing from TeknoSeed AB in November 2002, and $3 million in startup financing from Creandum and Teknoinvest AS in March 2005.

PERSONNEL
Chairman Per Andersson; president and CEO Anders Dellson; co-founder, vice president and CTO Stefan Moh; co-founder and chief engineer Pontus Borg

ET CETERA
Mitrionics Inc., a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary, is based in Culver City, Calif. The company is working with supercomputer maker Cray Inc. to program via software FPGAs integrated into Cray's XD1 system.

MISSION
Imprint lithography systems for high-resolution and three-dimensional pattern recognition by semiconductor device makers and other industry manufacturers. Has licensed Step and Flash Imprint Lithography (S-FIL)-related technology for the lifetime of the patents. S-FIL technology was invented at the University of Texas at Austin under professors Grant Willson and S.V. Sreenivasan.

PRODUCTS
The entry-level Imprio 55, based on S-FIL technology, has been available since May 2004. The Imprio 100 middle-level S-FIL tool for small-scale manufacturing facilities was released January 2003. The Imprio 250, the most advanced S-FIL tool for device and process prototyping and preproduction at 65-nanometer and finer nodes, was launched February 2005.

MONEY
Founded in 2001, company has raised more than $60 million to date, including $17 million in September in the first closing of a planned $25 million Series C financing round. Participants included Dai Nippon Printing, Alloy Ventures, Motorola Ventures, Harris & Harris, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Hakuto, Asset Management Partners and others.

PERSONNEL
CEO Mark Melliar-Smith, co-founder and CTO S.V. Sreenivasan, co-founder Grant Willson

ET CETERA
S-FIL technology won an EE Times ACE Award for Most Promising New Technology in March. Among companies that work solely on imprint lithography, Molecular Imprints claims to be the largest.

MISSION
High-performance reconfigurable DSP cores and broadband wireless technologies for software-defined radio.

PRODUCTS
M-rDSP cores are available for licensing. Offerings will expand over the next two years with a new-generation architecture that will retain code compatibility while allowing more parallelism, improved I/O and memory bandwidth. The company will also license physical-layer software as part of a vertical solution enabling broadband radio.

MONEY
Has raised roughly $20 million to date, including first close of a $10 million Series C funding round in April, co-led by Smart Technology Ventures and BridgeWest LLC. Has also received investments from Cadence Design Systems Inc. and Freescale Semiconductor Inc.

PERSONNEL
CEO John Rayfield, co-founder and chief scientist Fadi Kurdahi, co-founder Nader Bagherzadeh

ET CETERA
Founded in 2000. Has taped out and will have test silicon of MS-2 software radio engine in early 2006; the MS-2 will appear in end devices in 2007 time frame.

MISSION
Electron-beam system with about 10 beams for use in high-throughput maskless lithography applications.

MONEY
Privately held company has raised about $10 million in venture funding to date (excluding NIST funding). Lead investor is DynaFund Ventures.

PERSONNEL
President T.S. Ravi, CTO William Parker, vice president of engineering Dan Miller, vice president of systems engineering Allen Carroll

ET CETERA
Received $2.8 from National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop multiple e-beam column. Has demonstrated multiple-layer e-beam column to board of directors.

MISSION
Make turnkey nanoimprint lithography available to experts and nonexperts of microfabrication.

PRODUCTS
A line of nanoimprint lithography technology, including tools, materials, masks and processes.

MONEY
Company has been fully supported by its own revenue since its founding in 1999.

ET CETERA
Holds exclusive license to nanoimprint lithography technology developed by Chou at the University of Minnesota and Princeton University. Nanonex has been aided by CEOs of several Silicon Valley semiconductor equipment companies, who serve as business advisers. Has served more than 30 customers in North America, Europe and Asia.

MONEY
Secured funding totaling $37 million as of June, when it closed a $20 million Series B round. Announced a $10.3 million R&D contract from Darpa in August 2004. Primary investors include Benchmark Capital, Mohr Davidow Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, OnPoint Technologies, Mitsui & Co. and Stanford University. Individual Investors include Martin Roscheisen, Sergey Brin, Sunil Paul, and Carl and Lawrence Page.

PERSONNEL
CEO R. Martin Roscheisen, executive vice president of operations Werner Dumanski, vice president of engineering Chris Eberspacher, director of process engineering Craig Leidholm

ET CETERA
Development partners include Stanford University and Sandia National Laboratories. Company is building a factory at an unannounced location capable of annually producing photovoltaic panels with 120 watts of power output. Owns more than 42 patents.

MISSION
Will enter semiconductor foundry market with 0.35- and 0.25-micron CMOS technology licensed from Intel Corp. and 0.25-micron technology licensed from Silicon Storage Technology Inc.

PRODUCTS
Initial 200-mm wafer fab was scheduled to break ground late in 2005, with pilot production expected in late 2006.

ET CETERA
Announced an agreement in January to license Silicon Storage Technology Inc.'s 0.25-micron SuperFlash technology and serve as a foundry for SST's 0.25-micron SuperFlash-based products. SST is also an investor.

PRODUCTS
Xframe, 10-Gbit Ethernet PCI-X 1.0 server and storage adapter; Xframe II, 10-Gbit Ethernet PCI-X 2.0 server and storage adapter; Xframe E, 10-Gbit Ethernet PCI Express server and storage adapter.

MONEY
Founded in 2001 as S2io Inc. and renamed in January 2005, the company nabbed $42 million in three rounds of funding as of 2004. DC Venture Capital, JAFCO Ventures, Menlo Ventures and VenGrowth have been identified as investors.

PERSONNEL
President and CEO Dave Zabrowski, vice president of software engineering Leonid Grossman, vice president of hardware engineering Dennis Shwed, CTO Lee Shepherd

ET CETERA
IBM uses Xframe II Ethernet adapters in its xSeries server systems. Xframe products used by McGill University's Ultra-Videoconferencing team won Most Innovative Use of New Technology award at the Supercomputing 2005 Conference.

MISSION
Integrated platform for automating wireless threat protection, covering organizations' assets both inside and outside their facilities.

PRODUCTS
RFprotect suite includes flagship RFprotect Distributed, RFprotect Endpoint enterprise-class solution and RFprotect Mobile laptop-based suite.

MONEY
Secured $6 million in total venture capital financing led by Geneva Venture Partners, joined by Innovacom, the investment arm of France Telecom, and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

ET CETERA
Has developed the industry's first public database to aggregate and communicate wireless vulnerabilities. The WVE database (located at www.wirelessve.org) was created to catalog security threats for products or protocols specifically designed for wireless communications, including 802.11, Bluetooth, EVDO, Edge, HSDPA, 802.16/WiMax, voice-over-wireless LAN and RFID.

MISSION
Network infrastructure-based security solution that combines high-speed security processing at low latency to obtain full LAN security without compromising performance.

PRODUCTS
LANenforcer 1000 and 2000 Series security appliances. LANsight security manager provides enterprise-class management, event correlation and reporting for up to 100 LANenforcers.

MONEY
Funding from venture capital firms, including New Enterprise Associates, BlueRun Ventures and New Path Ventures.

PERSONNEL
President and CEO Charles Dauber, co-founder and director of software development Amol Mahajani, co-founder and director of ASIC development Manish Muthal, senior vice president of engineering and operations Prabhat Mishra

ET CETERA
Founded in 2002 by Muthal, an ASIC engineer from Juniper Networks, and Mahajani, a software-engineering manger from Cisco Systems, who saw that the worlds of enterprise networking and LAN security were coming together.

MISSION
Miniaturized, high-resolution scanning electron microscope (SEM) for microelectronics, nanotechnology and microbiology industries.

PRODUCTS
The mySEM product, with a replaceable e-beam engine design, will be available for evaluation in the summer of 2006.

MONEY
Privately held company has received government grants and contracts but hasn't detailed funding. Novelx is preparing to raise additional capital to support ongoing product development and initial customer deployments, according to vice president of business development Jim Rynne.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder and president Lawrence Muray, co-founder and CTO James Spallas, director of engineering Charles Silver

ET CETERA
Founded in 2002. Received Small Business Innovative Research grant from the Department of Defense's Chemical and Biological Defense program in July 2003. Received two-year, $2.6 million contract from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop a prototype next-generation maskless lithography system. Prototype was demonstrated in September 2005.

MISSION
Fabless ASIC company with offices in the United States and India is attempting to drive down ASIC costs with its end-to-end OpenModel process.

PRODUCTS
OpenModel involves customers in supply chain decisions of ASIC development and production, from intellectual-property, process and foundry selection through packaging and test.

MONEY
Secured $19.5 million in two rounds of private-equity financing. Investors include InterWest Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder, president and CEO Naveed Sherwani; co-founder, vice president of marketing and business development, Scott Houghton; co-founder and vice president of engineering, Satya Gupta

ET CETERA
Opened Design Center Unit in Bangalore, India, in July capable of completing 15 tapeouts. The company hopes to add second design center and complete 20 to 25 tapeouts in 2006.

MISSION
Advanced optical-disk storage systems with very high memory capacity and very high transfer rate.

PRODUCTS
Collinear Holographic Media Analyzer, a material characterizer of holographic-recording media based on Optware's patented Collinear holographic technology.

MONEY
Had raised roughly $13.5 million as of June, including $14 million in venture capital in its fifth and latest round of equity financing. The money came from four investors: Toshiba, Dai-Ichi Seimei Capital, Daiwa Securities SMBC Principal Investments and The Shoko Chukin Bank. It will be used to accelerate the launch of the Holographic Versatile Disc storage system.

ET CETERA
Formed Optware Corp. of America to develop products, applications and software components for the company's patented Collinear holographic storage technology, Magnum Series Holographic Versatile Disc drives and other related technologies.

MISSION
A power-efficient multiprocessor architecture based on Power processor cores licensed from IBM Corp.

PRODUCTS
PWRficient 64-bit multicore processors are aimed at both the embedded and high-performance computing markets.

MONEY
Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and Venrock Associates, and the Silicon Valley Bank.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder, president and CEO Dan Dobberpuhl; co-founder and executive vice president, sales and business development, Amarjit Gill; co-founder and COO Leo Joseph

ET CETERA
P.A. Semi is a founding member of Power.org, whose mission is to develop, enable and promote Power Architecture technology as an open-standard hardware-development platform for the electronics industry.

MISSION
Combine novel materials and fabrication techniques to create low-cost, scalable, manufacturable processes for printed plastic electronic circuits.

PRODUCTS
Initial target of plastic electronic materials is active-matrix backplanes, but company claims its technology is applicable to diverse markets.

MONEY
Has secured $30 million from financial and industrial investors. Lead investors are Amadeus Capital Partners and PolyTechnos Venture-Partners. Other investors are Dow Venture Capital, Banc of America Equity Partners, Yasuda Enterprise Development, Siemens Venture Capital and Nanotech Partners.

PERSONNEL
CEO Stuart M. Evans, chief scientist Henning Sirringhaus, CTO Cathy J. Curling

ET CETERA
Spun out of Cambridge University in 2000. Operates prototyping facility in Cambridge and commenced construction this year of 30,000-square-foot technology center in Sedgefield, England, to be completed in the first half of 2007. Company has a nonexclusive agreement with E Ink Corp. to cooperate on the design and fabrication of flexible all-plastic electronic displays. Entered joint development agreement with NTT Docomo to develop flexible active-matrix displays for future mobile-device applications, and with Siemens Communications to develop flexible displays for mobile devices.

MISSION
Hydrocarbon polymer-based membranes for portable and automotive fuel cell systems.

PRODUCTS
Membranes for portable direct-methanol fuel cells for portable electronics and for hydrogen fuel cells used to power automotive vehicles.

MONEY
Publicly listed on the AIM stock exchange in London. Raised approximately $40 million in its first five years. International cast of investors includes Intel Capital, Mayfield, Technology Partners and SRI International from the United States; Caisse de dépôt, Chrysalix Energy and Ventures West from Canada; Conduit Ventures from Europe; BiNext Capital of South Korea and KTB Ventures, U.S. arm of a South Korean private equity firm; Hotung Group of Taiwan; and Yasuda Enterprise Development of Japan.

PERSONNEL
President and CEO James D. Balcom, vice president of engineering Henry Voss

ET CETERA
Polyfuel was spun out of SRI International in 1999, after 14 years of applied membrane research, and targets portable fuel cell system developers. The company claims that five of the largest Japanese and Korean consumer electronics companies rank its portable fuel cell membrane as the best available.

MISSION
Using technology developed by Philips' corporate R&D to manufacture active-matrix backplanes and shift registers for commercial rollable displays for mobile systems.

PRODUCTS
Five-inch diagonal QVGA rollable display with 85-dot/inch resolution in paperback-size casing offers monochrome plus four shades of gray. Larger color and touchscreen models are on the road map.

MONEY
This Philips Technology Incubator spin-out is seeking third-party investment.

PERSONNEL
CEO Karl McGoldrick, COO Guido Aelbers, chief technology scientist Gerwin Gelinck

ET CETERA
Demonstrated rollable display within a year of January 2003 launch; started pilot production line in September 2004.

PRODUCTS
Lyric Physical Design Framework includes floor planner and routing tool, editor environment, plus memory, analog/mixed-signal and timing-closure tools. Prelude Physical Design Framework is for large digital/ASIC designs.

MONEY
First-round investment of $5.5 million came from Prime Technology Ventures and Index Ventures in 2003.

PERSONNEL
CEO Ken Roberts; co-founder and COO Mark Williams; co-founder and CTO Jeremy Birch; co-founder and vice president of business development, Japan, Fumiaki Sato; co-founder and vice president of R&D Mark Waller

ET CETERA
Semiconductor customers including Elpida, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, NEC, Panasonic and Sony have realized more than 100 tapeouts. Launched in January 2002, Pulsic opened U.S. headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., last March.

PRODUCTS
XLR Thread processors (MIPS64-based multicore, multithreaded architecture designed for connected computing applications in the enterprise and data center); XL processors (MIPS64-based processors aimed at office automation and digital entertainment); Orion Intelligent access processors (deliver Ethernet services over Ethernet carrier networks); and Pegasus PDH access processors (enable T1/E1/J1 and T3/E3 support in various access applications).

MONEY
Company claimed in May 2005 to have already generated significant revenue from major customers. Investors include Warburg Pincus, Benchmark Capital, Kodiak Venture Partners and Duff Ackerman & Goodrich LLC.

PERSONNEL
Founder, chairman and CEO Atiq Raza, chief strategy officer Aamer Latif

ET CETERA
Formed in 2002 by Raza, a former executive at Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and NexGen Microsystems Inc., the company has offices or operations in China, Japan and India.

MISSION
Established in 2004 with the aim of becoming the leading independent Chinese design company.

PRODUCTS
CMOS RF transceiver and power amplifier module for cell phone applications taped out and was qualified by RDA's customer.

ET CETERA
Operates design facility in Beijing. More than 90 percent of RDA's 80-plus employees have master's or higher degrees.

MISSION
To apply the electrochemical pattern-replication (ECPR) processing method to achieve cost and time savings over traditional lithography-based processes in producing micro- and nanoscale metal patterns.

ET CETERA
Demonstrated full wafer printing of copper patterns with dimensions down to 500/300-nanometer line/space, and claims ECPR metallization process can be applied to electronic applications and microdevices.

MISSION
Zinc-air rechargeable-battery technology as higher-energy-density replacements for lithium-ion batteries in mobile telephony and consumer electronics applications.

PRODUCTS
ReVolt battery currently in development will aim for 4x to 5x more efficiency than current leading-edge technology. Initially targeting cell phones, portable PCs and digital cameras, technology may also be applied to transportation and power generation.

MONEY
$8 million in a first round of financing by Northzone Ventures, Sofinnova Partners, Techno Venture Management and Viking Ventures.

ET CETERA
Company grew out of Sintef, the Foundation for Scientific and Industrial Research at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, a leading independent research institute in Trondheim, Norway.

MISSION
Wireless multimedia system that solves problems surrounding voice, video and data distribution throughout the home over any standards-based Wi-Fi network.

MONEY
More than $14 million in two rounds of financing from Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, WK Technology Fund and Investor AB in Sweden.

ET CETERA
Ruckus Interoperability and Open Testing program aims to ensure flawless operation of Internet-enabled media appliances — such as set-top boxes, personal video recorders, mobile video players, high-end home entertainment servers and conditional-access systems — over the company's standards-based, multimedia-purposed Wi-Fi technology.

MISSION
Ion-implantation subsystems and advanced ion-source materials for manufacturing advanced integrated circuits at the lowest cost and highest throughput.

PRODUCTS
Ion sources, a critical component of ion implanters, which are used to fabricate the doping structures that create transistors.

MONEY
Latest funding round of $26 million led by LightSpeed Venture Partners with participation from Sierra Ventures and existing private investors.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder, CEO and president Brian Cohen; co-founder, CTO and executive vice president Thomas Horsky

ET CETERA
Subsidiary SemEquip Materials Inc. specializes in the production of advanced semiconductor implant materials.

MISSION
To migrate circuit-switching networks to packet networks, and create open and secure voice application layer for delivering Session Initiation Protocol services from the multiservice edge.

PRODUCTS
Open Network Xchange product portfolio for carrier-class residential voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) deployments; Intelligent Voice Gateway for carrier and service provider networks.

MONEY
Raised $61 million with backing from venture capital firms Columbus Nova, Core Capital Partners, InflectionPoint Ventures, Kodiak Venture Funds, Mid-Atlantic Venture Funds, Technology Venture Partners and Telus Ventures.

PERSONNEL
CEO Dennis Chateauneuf, senior vice president of research and development Victor Diloreto

ET CETERA
Founded in 2000, company claims it has fundamentally redesigned the time-to-profitability for VoIP service providers using breakthrough software, silicon, security and service-intelligence innovations that eliminate the limitations of current soft-switch solutions.

MISSION
End-to-end 802.16 (WiMAX) standards-based silicon and embedded software for broadband wireless-access market.

PRODUCTS
Full media-access control and physical-layer system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for WiMAX basestations and subscriber stations, delivered with hardware drivers and MAC and scheduling functions. IEEE 802.16e mobile WiMAX solution due in the first half of 2006.

MONEY
Shareholders include Add Partners, CapDecisif, T-Source Gestion, SG Asset Management and Vision Capital.

PERSONNEL
President and CEO Georges Karam, vice president of engineering Bertrand Debray, chief scientist Hikmet Sari

ET CETERA
Founded in 2003, Sequans has 50 employees in Cupertino, Calif., and Singapore, and holds 50 patents. Has shipped SoCs based on IEEE 802.16-2004 to support fixed and nomadic WiMAX devices.

MISSION
Low-cost, low-power silicon receiver solution to enable mass-market mobile digital TV.

PRODUCTS
SMS1000, CMOS multiband, multistandard receiver for mobile DTV applications.

MONEY
Series A funding of $11.5 million was led by Jerusalem Venture Partners, with participation from Star Ventures and Walden Israel.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder, president and CEO Alon Ironi; co-founder and COO Hamutal Raab; vice president, R&D, Lior Peleg; CTO Guy Shochet

ET CETERA
Founded in June 2004, Siano collaborates in developing and marketing a comprehensive solution for mobile digital TV devices with NDS, a provider of secure content-delivery technology for digital pay TV. Former Infineon CEO Ulrich Schumacher is on the board of directors.

MISSION
Semiconductor systems solutions for high-speed, high-bandwidth wireless communications platforms.

PRODUCTS
Promises to deliver chips, hardware and software for a new generation of wireless technology.

MONEY
Founded in December 2004 with $1.25 million seed financing from New Enterprise Associates and U.S. Venture Partners. Foundation Capital is also an investor.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder, president and CEO Tim A. Williams; co-founder and CTO Chinh Doan; co-founder and chief architect Sohrab Emami; co-founder and senior director of engineering C. Bernard Shung; co-founder and vice president of marketing and business development John Marshall; vice president of engineering Jeffrey M. Gilbert

ET CETERA
Company's work is based on academic research by co-founders at the Berkeley Wireless Research Center.

MISSION
Advanced dielectric materials built using proprietary molecular engineering, with an initial focus on chip making and flat-panel displays.

PRODUCTS
Portfolio, based on siloxane chemistries, for IC makers addresses high thermal stability, high modulus and hardness, low-k performance, high cracking threshold and stability in multiple chemical environments to produce faster, less power-hungry chips.

MONEY
Privately held; European and Silicon Valley-based investors include InnovationsKapital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, VPSA, European Venture Partners, the Technology Agency of Finland and others.

ET CETERA
Nagase & Co. Ltd. manufactures Silecs' portfolio of IC dielectric products at a high-purity electronic chemical manufacturing site in Himeji, Japan. Nagase also distributes the products in Japan. European headquarters in Espoo, Finland, does research and development, materials characterization, process scale-up and world-class manufacturing. Company is collaborating with Cypress Semiconductor Corp., under a February 2004 deal, to develop and test Silecs' nonporous, low-k dielectric materials for some Cypress ICs.

MISSION
EDA tools for use in deploying self-timed network-on-chip interconnect technology for low-power designs.

PRODUCTS
ChainWorks suite of tools for producing chip-area interconnect network (Chain) fabrics was scheduled to be announced this month or next.

MONEY
Has received backing from Intel Capital, the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and others.

PERSONNEL
CEO and co-founder Roy McGuffin and co-founders John Bainbridge and Andrew Bardsley

ET CETERA
Founded in December 2003, this venture-funded spinout from the University of Manchester's Amulet asynchronous-logic research group is based in the Manchester Science Park; U.S. office in San Jose, Calif.

MISSION
Clustered interconnect solutions to serve the global high-performance business computing market.

PRODUCTS
Infiniband host-channel adapters, standalone and modular Infiniband switches, patented virtual I/O gateways for Ethernet and Fibre Channel, and a software suite to support business applications for an installation-to-operation process.

PERSONNEL
Co-founder and CTO Todd A. Matters, co-founder and executive vice president Philip A. Murphy, president and CEO Russ Hawkins

ET CETERA
Arrived in 2002 as InfiniCon Systems Inc.; renamed SilverStorm in May.

MISSION
Timing, clock and RF chips that incorporate MEMS timing-reference devices inside standard silicon chips, eliminating the need for quartz crystals.

PRODUCTS
Samples of its first oscillator products are to be available in the first quarter of 2006.

MONEY
New Enterprise Associates, Greylock Partners, CampVentures and others.

PERSONNEL
Founder, president and CEO Kurt Petersen; COO and executive vice president Markus Lutz; CTO Aaron Partridge; chief scientist Bernhard E. Boser

ET CETERA
Technology licensed exclusively from Robert Bosch GmbH allows quartz timing functions to be integrated on standard silicon chips that perform as well as or better than traditional quartz-based solutions.

MISSION
Advanced serial switched interconnects for compute and communications equipment.

PRODUCTS
AXSys line of Advanced Switching Interconnect products includes ASI switches, bridges, development kits and software for compute, storage and communications applications; StarFabric chip and board-level switched-interconnect products, aimed at embedded systems needing enhanced switched PCI capability.

MONEY
Raised $15.5 million in 2005 in second-round funding to finance next-generation development and sales expansion, bringing total capital investment to $24 million; investors include Commonwealth Capital, Eastward Capital Partners, Intel Capital, Ironside Ventures, Morgenthaler and Vesbridge Partners.

PERSONNEL
Four co-founders: CEO Tim Miller, CTO Todd Comins, chief scientist David Mayhew, vice president of engineering Lynne Brocco

ET CETERA
As part of Asian expansion, announced in 2005 a director for sales operations in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, a dedicated sales partner in Japan, and distributors in Japan and China; announced shipment of 250,000 total StarFabric ports into 75 product designs worldwide as of October 2004.

MISSION
Real-time fault detection and classification (FDC) software for chip making.

PRODUCTS
Imprint MX combines advanced pattern-recognition, statistical mathematical techniques and sensor technology to provide real-time FDC. A scalable system, Imprint MX2, gives fabs and foundries portable fault libraries, improved FDC sensitivity across fault types and data-mining capabilities.

MONEY
Received $5.65 million in third-round venture funding from lead investor Vision Capital, existing investor ACT Venture Capital and new investor Intel Capital.

ET CETERA
Founded in 1998, Straatum has described customers' experience using its FDC solution to detect and remedy production faults, allowing a quick return to volume output.

MISSION
Chip sets, software protocols and system reference designs for the TD-SCDMA 3G standard to terminal manufacturers and design houses.

PRODUCTS
Reference design for dual-mode TD-SCDMA/GSM phone covers hardware platform and protocol software; TDD-LCR modem IC with embedded Philips Semiconductors DSP core supports downlink up to 384 kbits/second and uplink up to 148 kbits/s.

MONEY
A joint venture, T3G is backed by its venture partners: Royal Philips Electronics, Datang Mobile, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Motorola Inc.

ET CETERA
Incorporated in January 2003 as a joint venture of Royal Philips Electronics, Datang Mobile and Samsung; Motorola became an investor last January.

MISSION
Applying terahertz frequency waves for imaging and diagnostics, a technology that could have long-term implications for communications.

PRODUCTS
TPI Scan portable standalone system, for medical imaging and diagnosis and nonmedical imaging, rapidly creates a representation of any object placed on the imaging window; TPI Probe's remote head on an articulated arm can be positioned away from the surface of the instrument chassis to capture an image; TPl Spectra 1000 terahertz transmission spectrometer system provides access to intermolecular modes in substances important in the biological, chemical and physical sciences; TPl Spectra 2000 self-contained terahertz reflection spectrometer, for use in the research laboratory.

MISSION
SRAMs based on proprietary thin capacitively coupled thyristor (TCCT) technology, which provides DRAM density with SRAM speed.

PRODUCTS
Expected to be available in the next few months, these synchronous SRAMs, based on TCCT technology and compatible with existing SRAMs, will come in four densities, from 9 to 72 Mbits, in the following models: pipelined read, single-cycle deselect burst; pipelined read, double-cycle deselect burst; and flow-through read, single-cycle deselect pipelined burst.

MONEY
Closed $40 million Series C funding in April led by InterWest Partners and joined by CenterPoint Ventures, Tallwood Venture Capital, Mayfield, US Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates, raising total funding to more than $46 million.

PERSONNEL
President and CEO Lowell Turriff; CTO Farid Nemati; vice president, technology, Scott Robins

ET CETERA
Announced granting of 32 patents over the past three years for its memory technology; named Freescale Semiconductor as foundry partner for initial TCCT-based SRAMs based on 130-nm SOI.

MISSION
Materials and processing procedures for "pseudo-maskless" nanoimprint lithography.

PRODUCTS
Lithography layer masks that perform molecular-transfer lithography in place of a photomask, high-resolution xPT polymer masks/ templates for commercial nanoimprint litho tools and xFilm chemical material to protect a wafer, mask or flat-panel display from particles.

ET CETERA
This Stanford University spin-off, founded in 2004, uses Darpa-funded research conducted at Stanford.

MISSION
Ultrawideband wireless-networking chip sets that support studio-quality video and audio for multimedia consumer electronics, handheld devices and PC peripherals.

MONEY
Raised $15.5 million in a funding round in 2004, with investors August Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, U.S. Venture Partners and VentureTech Alliance.

PERSONNEL
President and CEO Barry A. Hoberman, founder and CTO Rajeev Krishnamoorthy, vice president of engineering David Shoemaker

MISSION
Semiconductor IP, design services and turnkey services, including manufacturing, packaging, testing and delivery for China-based foundries.

PRODUCTS
RTL-to-GDSII back-end design service. Standard design platforms include standard-cell libraries, I/O cell libraries and memory compilers optimized for 0.25-micron and finer processes of Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., HeJian Technology (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and Shanghai Hua Hong NEC Electronics Co. Ltd., and 0.6-micron and finer processes of Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp.

MONEY
Has received $20 million since 2001. Investors include WI Harper Group, IDG Technology Venture Investment, iGlobe Partners, Harbinger Ventures, Intel Capital, HSBC Private Equity (Asia) Ltd., CID Group, Legend Capital, KTBnetwork, Unite Capital Investment, Legend Capital and International Finance Corp.

PERSONNEL
Chairman, president and CEO Wayne Dai; CTO Xiaonan Zhang; Bill Wang, general manager of VeriSilicon Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.)

ET CETERA
Fabless ASIC design foundry founded in 2001 employs 140 engineers; has operation centers in Shanghai; Taipei, Taiwan; Santa Clara; Tokyo. Tapes out on average a design a week in 0.18-micron or finer process.

PRODUCTS
Voltaire ISR 9288 scales to 288 Infiniband 10-Gbit/second ports in a single chassis; Voltaire ISR 9024 Infiniband switch with 480-Gbit/s throughput; Voltaire ISR 6000 modular platform for Infiniband clusters interconnected with TCP/IP and Fibre Channel networks; Voltaire HCA line of low-profile, dual-port Infiniband host-channel adapter cards; VoltaireVision Infiniband fabric-management software; Voltaire IP Infiniband-to-TCP/IP router; Voltaire Infiniband-to-Fibre Channel router.

MONEY
Closed $15 million in financing in 2005. Baker Capital Corp., The Challenge Fund-Etgar LP, Concord Ventures, Hitachi Ltd., Pitango Venture Capital, Platinum Venture Capital, Quantum, Tamir Fishman Ventures, TechnoPlus Ventures, Vertex Venture Capital and others.

PERSONNEL
Chairman and CEO Ronnie Kenneth, founder and vice president of business development Amir Prescher, CTO Yaron Haviv

ET CETERA
Pentagon uses Voltaire's Infiniband-based grid backbone switching solutions as part of a 10-teraflops clustered supercomputer.