By Peter Clarke, 4/27/2006
This article © CMP Media, LLC
The EE Times 60 Emerging Startups list, first published in April 2004, has been updated to version 5.0 to reflect the latest corporate, commercial and technological conditions.
Some companies have dropped off the list, otherwise known as the Silicon 60, because they have been acquired; some have moved to an initial public offering of shares; and others have moved beyond the list with the passage of time. As they have matured other, younger startups have been nominated to move off the EE Times radar list and on to the main list.
In version 5.0 of the EE Times Emerging Startups list, editors have selected companies based on a mix of criteria including: technology, intended market, maturity, financial position and investment profile.
Startups on the Silicon 60 list include companies involved in semiconductor chips, memory, fab equipment, packaging, foundry, materials, MEMS and EDA software that made an impression on EE Times editors. They are emerging companies to watch for a wide variety of reasons.
EE Times welcomes the following companies to the 60 Emerging Startups list version 5.0:
Airgo Networks Inc.
Aprio Technologies Inc.
Cambrios Technologies Inc.
Clairvoyante Inc.
Clear Shape Technologies Inc.
Enuclia Semiconductor Inc.
Group4 Lab LLC
Intrinsic Semiconductor Inc.
Invarium Inc.
Light Blue Optics Ltd.
Metara Inc.
Newport Media Inc.
SemIndia Inc.
SiBeam Inc.
Tarari Inc.
Tekion Inc.
TimeLab Corp.
WiQuest Communications Inc.
XsunX Inc.
Readers are welcome to nominate their own emerging startups for inclusion in a future version of the EE Times 60 Emerging Startups list. Nominations should be supported by a short citation explaining why the company is suitable for inclusion on the list.
Send comments and nominations to Peter Clarke (pclarke@cmp.com) or Mark Lapedus (mlapedus@cmp.com).
EE Times 60 emerging startups version 5.0
The asterisks by each name show the number of iterations of the Silicon 60 list on which that company has appeared.
** Achronix Semiconductor Corp. (Ithaca, New York) is a startup company associated with Cornell University from where it has licensed patents. In April 2006 the company announced a prototype field programmable gate array that it said can operate at clock frequencies of 1.93-GHz and that it plans to come to market in 2007. www.achronix.com
*Airgo Neworks Inc. (Palo, Alto, Calif.), founded in 2001, has been a pioneer of using multiple antennas to improve wireless communications; a technique known as Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO). www.airgonetworks.com
**** Analogix Semiconductor Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif., and Beijing, China) a start-up with operations split between Silicon Valley and Beijing, has introduced physical-layer transceiver ICs that can achieve up to 25-Gbit/s data rate over copper wire. www.analogix.com
** Applied Microstructures Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) was founded in January 2003. The company's molecular vapor deposition (MVD) technology is being applied to the growth of nanometer scale films for application in microsensors, life sciences and nanotechnology research.www.appliedmst.com
* Aprio Technologies Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) is a vendor of design-for-manufacturability software. www.aprio.com
***** Arithmatica Inc. (Redwood City, Calif.) develops and licenses IP libraries based on proprietary math circuitry. www.arithmatica.com
**** Arteris SA (Paris) is an intellectual-property vendor that is commercializing a packet-based on-chip network. It's founders are the beneficiaries of the sell off of a previous startup, Tsqware Inc. www.arteris.net
** Calypto Design Systems Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.), founded in 2002, is a privately held EDA company focused on bridging electronic system-level design and integrated circuit implementation with particular emphasis on formal verification. www.calypto.com
**** Cambridge Semiconductor Ltd. (Cambridge, England) was founded in August 2000 as a fabless power semiconductor spin-off company from the local university. It appointed former LSI Logic executive and Cantab-man David Baillie as its chief executive officer in March 2004. www.camsemi.co.uk
* Cambrios Technologies Corp. (Mountain View, Calif.) was formed in 2003 to develop commercial applications from the directed-evolution technology invented by the company’s founders, Angela Belcher of MIT and her longtime collaborator, Evelyn Hu of the University of California at Santa Barbara. www.cambrios.com
* Clairvoyante Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.), founded in July 2000, licenses pixel architectures and algorithms that are optimized to enhance the performance of liquid crystal displays. www.clairvoyante.com
* Clear Shape Technologies Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), founded in 2003, is a semiconductor design for manufacturing (DFM) software and technologies company which has raised more than $10 million in venture capital financing. Intel Capital led its latest round. www.clearshape.com
** Commit Inc. (Shanghai, China) was established in February 2002 with the backing of Texas Instruments, Nokia, LG Electronics Inc. and numerous Chinese institutions as a fabless chip company to deliver TD-SCDMA terminal chipsets. http://www.tdscdma-forum.org/en/prolink/commit.asp
*** Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems Inc. (Foxborough, Mass.) has demonstrated the use of an implantable microelectrode array that, when combined with a digital signal processing system, forms its so-called "BrainGate" interface, which has been used to allow thought to control a television. www.cyberkineticsinc.com
*** Dafca Inc. (Framingham Mass.), a startup provider of EDA software tools that is working to apply a reconfigurable infrastructure platform for system-on-chip devices. STMicroelectronics is one of 14 companies that have signed letters of intent to use Dafca's tool. www.dafca.com
** DiBcom SA (Palaiseau, France) is a fabless semiconductor company developing chipsets for mobile television reception. The company closed a fourth round of funding at 24.5 million euro (about $29.9 million) in August 2005 and included Intel Capital amongst its investors. www.dibcom.net
** Diseno de Sistemas en Silicio SA (Valencia, Spain), otherwise known as Design for Systems on Silicon or DS2, was founded in 1998 and is a supplier of silicon and software for communications over power lines (PLC). The company is aiming its chipset at delivering data rates of up to 200-Mbits per second. www.ds2.es
*** Emerging Memory Technologies Inc. (Kanata, Ontario) EMT was founded in December 2004 and is a fabless design house offering memory design services and developing IP cores specializing in DRAM, SRAM and other novel memory technologies. www.emergingmemory.com
* Enuclia Semiconductor (Beaverton, Ore.) was founded in 2003 with the aim of producing better digital television processing chips. www.enuclia.com
** EnOcean GmbH (Oberhaching, Germany) was founded in 2001 as a spin-off from Siemens AG research labs. It's charter is to create sensors that are wireless, that scavange energy from the environment and are reliable enough to be maintenance free. www.enocean.com
* Group4 Lab LLC (Menlo Park, Calif.), founded in 2003, is an "extreme materials" supplier that develops unusual semiconductor materials for use in various markets including wireless components, biotech devices, satellite and radar components, consumer electronics, solid-state lighting. www.group4labs.com
*** Handshake Solutions NV (Eindhoven, Netherlands), has worked with ARM Holdings plc to produce an asynchronous processor based on the ARM9 core. The ARM996HS, claimed to be the first commercial clockless processor, was disclosed in February 2006 along with the claim that it could cut power consumption to nearly one third that of a similar clocked processor core. www.handshakesolutions.com
***** Icera Semiconductor Inc. (Bristol, England), founded in 2002, provides semiconductor chips for 3G-HSDPA handsets and datacards. It was founded by, amongst others, the founder of Element14 Ltd., a company which was eventually sold to Broadcom Corp. www.icerasemi.com
**** Ignios Ltd. (Oxford, England), formed in 2003, is developing a scheduling and monitoring hardware and software infrastructure, called SystemWeaver, which is intended to ease the use multiple programmable cores on a single chip. www.ignios.com
** Imperas Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.) was formed in 2005 by Simon Davidmann, a serial entrepreneur and an experienced developer of EDA tools. The company plans to cater for a major change in design style by offering system development tools that combine the elaboration of both hardware and software while dealing with multiprocessing issues. www.imperas.com
***** Innovative Silicon Inc. (Lausanne, Switzerland) is a 2002 start-up founded by Pierre Fazan (CTO) to develop an SOI-based single-transistor memory. Now led by Mark-Eric Jones, Innovative has licensed its “floating body” memory to Advanced Micro Devices Inc. amongst others. www.innovativesilicon.com
** InPhase Technologies Inc. (Longmont, Colorado) was founded in December 2000 as a spinoff from Bell Labs research, with the objective of becoming the first company to bring holographic data storage technology to market. www.inphase-technologies.com
* Intrinsic Semiconductor Inc. (Dulles, Virginia), is a supplier of silicon-carbide and gallium-nitride wafers www.intrinsicsemi.com
* Invarium Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) is a provider of layout pattern synthesis tools which are architected for the 65-nanometer era and beyond www.invarium.com
* Light Blue Optics Ltd. (Cambridge, England) was founded in December 2003 by four photonics experts from Cambridge University Engineering Department. They set out to produce small, portable, power-efficient image projectors suitable for use in battery-powered electronic devices such as mobile phones and digital cameras. www.lightblueoptics.com
*** Luminescent Technologies Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.), backed by Sevin Rosen Funds, has developed a line of RET software products for use in optical proximity correction (OPC) and phase-shift photomask (PSM) applications. www.luminescent.com
*** Luxtera Inc. (Carlsbad, Calif.) is a fabless semiconductor company formed in 2001 to develop optical modulation devices based on a standard CMOS fabrication. The company closed a $22 million Series C investment round recently and said it would sample the world's first CMOS photonics products in Q2 2006 and ship them in Q1 2007. www.luxtera.com
* Metara Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), founded in 2000, offers mass spectrometer technology to allow inline monitoring and control of chemical processes during semiconductor device manufacture. www.metarainc.com
** Mitrionics AB (Lund, Sweden) was founded in 2000 and has developed a massively parallel soft virtual processor that eases the deployment of software on an FPGA-based acceleration system. A software development kit includes the Mitrion-C compiler tuned for use with the Mitrion Virtual Processor. www.mitrionics.com
***** Molecular Imprints Inc. (Austin, Texas) was founded in 2001 to design, develop, manufacture and support imprint lithography systems to be used by semiconductor device and other industry manufacturers. www.molecularimprints.com
* Newport Media Inc. (Lake Forest, Calif.) is fabless semiconductor company that sells chips for digital audio and mobile television standards. Founded in January 2005 the company closed a $25 million funding round in February 2006. www.newportmediainc.com
** Nanosolar Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.), which is developing roll-printed solar photovoltaic cells, announced it had closed a $20 million Series B round of funding in June 2005. www.nanosolar.com
*** Nanotech Corp. (Changzhou, China), a semiconductor foundry best known for having obtained manufacturing process technology, 0.35- and 0.25-micron CMOS, from Intel Corp. www.nanotech-corp.com
** Open-Silicon Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) is a fabless ASIC company with offices in the U.S. and Bangalore, India, attempting to drive down ASIC cost from IP selection through to packaging and test. www.open-silicon.com
** P.A.Semi Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) is a fabless semiconductor company developing a power-efficient multiprocessor architecture based on Power processor cores licensed from IBM Corp. The resulting modular architecture is aimed at both the embedded and high performance computing markets. The company is led by processor design luminary Dan Dobberpuhl. www.pasemi.com
***** Plastic Logic Ltd. (Cambridge, England) was founded in November 2000 as a spinoff from Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory. The company aims to combine plastic electronics with printing for low cost products such as flexible e-readers. www.plasticlogic.com
** PolyFuel Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) was spun out of SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) in 1999. It develops engineered membranes for application in fuel cells for portable and automotive applications. www.polyfuel.com
***** Polymer Vision NV (Eindhoven, Netherlands) is a business initiative within the Philips Technology Incubator aiming to bring flexible displays to market by combining polymer electronics with electronic ink. www.polymervision.com
** Raza Microelectronics Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.) was formed in 2002 by Atiq Raza, an executive who previously worked at Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and NexGen Microsystems Inc. The company is producing processors for network processing. www.razamicroelectronics.com
** RDA Microelectronics (Shanghai, China) was established in 2004 with the aim of becoming the leading independent Chinese design company. With $15 million from private equity firm Warburg Pincus, RDA has developed an all-CMOS RF transceiver for cell phone applications. www.rdamicro.com/en/
** ReVolt Technology A/S (Trondheim, Norway) was formed as a spinoff from contract research institute Sintef in 2004. The company's founder, Trygve Burchardt, has developed rechargeable zinc-air battery technology, which the company claims could replace lithium-ion batteries currently used in portable applications. www.revolttechnology.no
** SemEquip Inc. (North Billerica, Mass.) is a developer of ion implantation sub-systems and advanced ion source materials for the manufacture of logic and memory chips. www.semequip.com
* SemIndia Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.) is a company formed by expatriate Indians in California with a mission of making India a global hub for semiconductor manufacturing. The company is is working with the Indian government, state governments, and other strategic partners and customers to create a wafer fab in Indiawww.sem-india.com
** Sequans Communications SA (Paris, France), founded in 2003, has ambitions to become the leading supplier of silicon and embedded software for WiMAX-based wireless LAN systems. www.sequans.com
*** Siano Mobile Silicon Ltd. (Netanya, Israel), founded in June 2004, developers digital television receivers tailored specifically for mobile communications and entertainment devices. www.siano-ms.com
*** SiBeam Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) was founded in December 2004 by a team from the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) and several wireless and high-speed communications industry veterans. www.sibeam.com
*** Silistix Ltd. (Manchester, England), founded in December 2003 as a spinoff from the Amulet asynchronous logic research group at the University of Manchester in England, has received backing from Intel Capital. www.silistix.com
** T3G Technology Co. Ltd. (Beijing) is a fabless chip company developing chipsets for the TD-SCDMA 3G standard. The company is backed by Royal Philips Electronics, Datang Mobile and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. www.t3gt.com
* Tarari Inc. (San Diego, Calif.), a developer of content and XML processors, was launched in August 2002 by senior managers and employees formerly with Intel’s network equipment division. www.straatum.com
* Tekion Inc. (Burnaby, British Columbia), founded in 2003, is developing a chip-based micro fuel cell technology to serve as a power source for inclusion in portable equipment. www.tekion.com
***** TeraView Ltd. (Cambridge, England) A spin-off from Toshiba Europe Laboratories working on the application of terahertz frequency waves for vision through optically opaque objects and for chemical analysis. The technology could also have long-term implications for communications. www.teraview.com
* TimeLab Corp. (Andover, Mass.), founded in 2001, develops digital circuits to replace analog ones currently found in clocking, synchronization and data conversion applications. www.timelabcorp.com ** VeriSilicon Holdings Co. Ltd. (Shanghai, China) is a fabless ASIC design foundry focusing on providing semiconductor IP, design services and turnkey services including manufacturing, packaging, testing, and delivery. www.verisilicon.com
* WiQuest Communications Inc. (Allen, Texas), founded in 2003, is a fabless company developing chips for the ultrawideband (UWB) market. www.wiquest.com
* XsunX Inc. (Aliso Viejo, Calif.), is developing Power Glass, a thin film solar energy technology that allows glass windows to produce electricity. www.xsunx.com
