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Movidius, Computational Cameras and Vision Processors

maciej@chipcrunch.com (Maciej Bajkowski) — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 23:15:00 +0000

It seems we catch up with Movidius every three years or so, which is a good things as it means the company is still chugging along and turning out new and innovative silicon. We first encountered Movidius in 2008 when the company was called Movidia. Our last coverage was back in 2011 when the company raised $9M in Series C funding. and at which point the companies chips were targeted at 3D capture and video editing on mobile devices. A few years later, in June of 2013, the company has once again succeeded in raising more funding, this time securing a nice $16M in funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Altantic Bridge, Capital-E, AIB Seed Capital Fund, and DFJ Esprit. Overall the company has now raised $46.5M in funding.

Quantance, Series D funding and forward progress

maciej@chipcrunch.com (Maciej Bajkowski) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 05:03:18 +0000

We've covered many semiconductor startups over the years, many of which are nothing more than mere memories of ambitious undertakings. Fortunately, Quantance is not one of these companies, but rather one which has managed to flourish and acquire additional funding over time. We originally covered Quantance back in 2008 when the company raised $12 million in Series B funding, and followed up with more coverage in 2010 when the company raised an additional $11M in Series C funding. Earlier this month Quantance once again went back to the well and secured an additional $12M in Series D funding from existing investors TD Fund, DOCOMO Capital, Granite Ventures, and InterWest Partners.

Nitero, 60GHz WiGig coming soon to devices near you

maciej@chipcrunch.com (Maciej Bajkowski) — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 04:04:01 +0000

Just when it seemed that a simultaneous dual band 2.4/5 GHz router was a pretty good thing, there are a couple new standards just around the corner, namely 802.11ac and 802.11ad. The former operates in the 5GHz band and is in many ways considered the successor to the 802.11n standard. It implements a wider RF bandwidth of 80MHz (160MHz is optional) as compared to the 40MHz limit for 802.11n, multi-user MIMO, and high-density modulation which when all combined lead to a link rate of about 433 Mbits/s for a single antenna solution. Companies, such as Quantenna which we covered previously, have already released reference designs for 802.11ac.

semiconductor infographic: consolidating powers

maciej@chipcrunch.com (Maciej Bajkowski) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 05:21:04 +0000

Most of the time we either write about semiconductor startups or emerging technologies. But on occasion it can be interesting to take a look at what the big and established guys are doing, particularly when it is presented in a visually pleasing infographic courtesy of Farnell Semiconductors. As the infographic below shows, when it comes to the semiconductor industry, the sales leaders, which include Intel, Samsung, and TSMC, are growing significantly faster than the industry overall. Whereas these top three companies grew their revenue by a very healthy 12%, the overall industry managed a rather lackluster 2%. When it comes to countries, the USA and Taiwan did very well, while South Korea, Europe, and Japan lost market share over the last year - unfortunately the infographic does not contain information on China as it would be interesting to see if the growing fabless industry there has began to take market share from established players. There are several other statistics illustrated in the infographic which might be of interest as well including market share by company and capital expenditures - enjoy!

kalray, multi-purpose processor arrays

maciej@chipcrunch.com (Maciej Bajkowski) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 05:06:34 +0000

The race for ever higher clock frequencies in processor design ended many years ago, but engineers never fail envisioning new challenges and pushing design envelopes in new directions. The name of the game today seems to be the amount of cores that can be squeezed onto a single piece of silicon, while keeping the overall power manageable, and making the architecture somewhat programmable in order for the final product to be useful. We recently covered Adapteva and beforehand Tilera, both of which are located in the United States. The former of the two is working on designs which are projected to scale to 4096 cores and beyond. Today we cover Europe’s answer to the manycore challenge, namely Kalray, a startup headquartered in Paris, France which is working on designs consisting of up to 1024 processors.

Amalfi, the CMOS PArty keeps on going

maciej@chipcrunch.com (Maciej Bajkowski) — Thu, 03 May 2012 04:39:15 +0000

The number of companies developing CMOS Power-Amplifiers (PAs) has mushroomed lately, and yet many of them are able to raise significant funding from venture capital firms. Surely a day of reckoning, which will weed out the real innovators from the me too companies is coming in this space, but at least for now the CMOS PA party is still going strong. In our last post we covered Javelin Semiconductor, a company which recently raised $5 million in funding and is playing in this very space. This time around we cover Amalfi Semiconductor, a startup out of Los Gatos, California which just a week ago was able to raise $20M in Series D funding.

Javelin Semiconductor, helping your mobile device last longer

maciej@chipcrunch.com (Maciej Bajkowski) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 03:59:25 +0000

Battery capacity has not kept pace with our computing demands over the last decade. Several years ago a phone would easily last days without charging. Granted, the functionality was rather limited, but at least finding a socket at a popular conference or at a busy airport was not an issue. Nowadays, most consider themselves lucky should their smartphone last an entire day - Slowly but surely our always connected population is experiencing a fully-discharged device phobia. Some proposed solutions are on the way, including large inductive charging surfaces, which were demonstrated at a SxSW Interactive a couples weeks back. Engineers developing these surfaces, which allow any small or large electronic device to source power simply by being placed on it, foresee them installed ubiquitously one day. And while it would be nice to have your kitchen counters and office desks double as charging stations, we are simply not there yet, mostly due to regulatory hurdles.

GSA, Capital Lite Working Group

maciej@chipcrunch.com (Maciej Bajkowski) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:37:41 +0000

We’ve heard it many times before: Venture Capitalists (VCs) are no longer interested in semiconductor startups. They are too expensive, take too long, and the return on investment (ROI) is simply not there to justify the risk and the capital requirements. To be frank, many of these claims can be substantiated with data. Take for example the National Venture Capital Association data we analyzed in the middle of last year, where it was clearly evident that over the last decade the amount of investment into semiconductors has been decreasing year over year. And while the low came shortly after 2008, as expected, the trend has not reversed significantly since then. Similar data has been obtained by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) and as show in the table below depicts the amount of funding for fabless companies over the last decade:

Adapteva, an epiphany in more ways than one

maciej@chipcrunch.com (Maciej Bajkowski) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:43:39 +0000

When discussing companies developing many-core processors, as opposed to multi-core processors, several companies come to mind. On the network side of the spectrum where packet processing is one of the major tasks two companies, Cavium and NetLogic, are frequently encountered. The former has the Octeon II product family which features up to 32 MIPS cores, while the latter offers the XLP II products family with up to 80 nxCPUs. When it comes to general applications, a more recent newcomer by the name of Tilera comes to mind. Tilera’s top of the line product family, the Tile-Gx, features devices with up to a 100 identical cores in a mesh network configuration. An even more recent newcomer to the latter segment is Adapteva, and while other copmanies are content with just a few hundred cores, this company intends to scale their design initially to only a modest 4096 cores.

Movidius, mobile 3D capture and editing

maciej@chipcrunch.com (Maciej Bajkowski) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 04:48:13 +0000

The last time we covered Movidius in depth, back in 2008, the company was actually called Movidia. We couldn’t help but poke a little fun at the company name and the similarity to nVidia, so it might not be all that surprising that the company has undergone a name change. Of course, Movidius has done a lot more than just that over the last couple of years. For one, the company has had several successful venture funding rounds. In May of last year the company raised $7.5M in Series B funding from Celtic House Venture Partners, Capital E, Emertec Gestion, AIB Seed Capital Fund as well as angel investors. A couple weeks ago the company raised an additional $9M in Series C funding from the same investors, bringing the total amount of capital raised at this point to $30M.