Semiconductor Times Covers Vennsa in Startup Profiles

SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES JUNE 2010 / 1

® JUNE 2010 FOCUSED ON EMERGING SEMICONDUCTOR COMPANIES VOL 15 ISSUE 6 chain, which offer to embedded The company is funded by the Radar Scope systems designers a complete digital founders, and is forming a series of solution for all small- and mid-size synergistic corporate partnerships. The Kalray production series. Acuity team consists of the founders Kalray was founded in July 2008 to plus contractors. develop “the next generation of Joel Monnier, Ph.D., (former VP, programmable ICs for embedded com- Director of R&D Central ST Micro- Acuity is currently producing two puting.” The company’s mission is “to electronics) ultra-stable low-pressure MEMS Piezoresistive sensor die that are provide a new programmable logic Paris area: targeted to replace existing piezoresis- technology to serve the market demand 86 rue de Paris, F - 91 400 Orsay in high performance & flexible ICs.” tive pressure sensor die and open new Grenoble area: applications requiring very accurate Kalray is a spin off from CEA and the 445 rue Lavoisier low-pressure measurements. incubators Incuballiance & Grain, F - 38 330 Montbonnot Saint Martin The AC3030 is an advanced, low- capitalizing on 20 years of R&D. The Tel: +33 (0)4 76 18 09 18 pressure (20 to 100 mBar full-scale) company has received strong support Fax: +33 (0)4 76 18 94 71 sensor die, primarily meant for low- from CEA and CEA Leti, which has www.kalray.eu resulted in signing a contract for pressure differential pressure applica- technology transfer on 17 patents and tions such as breathing, sleep apnea, creation of a joint laboratory. industrial, and instrumentation. The Startup Profiles device is available in 20, 50 and 100 The company has raised euro 2.5 mil- mbar FS versions. lion in first round funding from a pool of investors, grouped around Rhone Acuity The AC3050 is a lower pressure (10 Alpes Creation, CEA Valorisation and Acuity (see July 2008 profile) was mBar FS) version of the AC3030, pri- ACE Management. Kalray will be founded in 2007 by MEMS industry marily meant for even lower-pressure seeking an additional 10 million euro veterans Jim Knutti and Henry Allen funding round in 2010. as a fabless provider of high performance, MEMS-based pressure sensors Kalray products include a family of and other MEMS devices that offer IN THIS ISSUE massively parallel multi-core proces- expanded capabilities, reliability, and Radar Scope ...... 1 sors along with their software tools a solid source of supply. Startup Profiles ...... 1 People ...... 10 SIA Mar.2010 Global Sales ($B) SEMI’s N. American Equipment Bk/Bl Funding & IPOs ...... 10 25.0 1600 1.4 Mergers & Acquisitions ...... 12

1400 1.2 20.0 Business & Financials ...... 13

1200 1 Market Research ...... 14 15.0 1000 0.8 Emerging Trends ...... 15 800 Bk/Bl Ratio 10.0 0.6 Dollars (Millions) Dollars New Products ...... 15 600

0.4 Licensing & Partnerships ...... 17 5.0 400

0.2 Design Wins ...... 17 200

0.0 0 0 Company Financials ...... 18 3/09 4/09 5/09 6/09 7/09 8/09 9/09 10/09 11/09 12/09 1/10 2/10 3/10 Apr-09 May-09 Jun-09 Jul-09 Aug-09 Sep-09 Oct-09 Nov-09 Dec-09 Jan-10 Feb-10 Mar-10 (final) Apr-10 (prelim.) Stock Charts ...... 19 America Europe Japan Asia Pacific Bookings Billings Book-to-Bill

performance and system level MEMS Cognovo believes that the time is ap- Startup Profiles niches. A number of Sensor OEMs cur- proaching where the demands on ter- (Continued from page 1) rently use Acuity’s die. minals to support myriad modes of differential pressure applications such wireless operation (eg. LTE, HSPA+, low-pressure instrumentation in indus- Dr. Jim Knutti, founder, President and E-GPRS, GSM, TD-SCDMA, trial measurement, medical and HVAC CEO (previously founder, President CDMA2000, WiFi and WiMAX, etc.) applications. Added stability enables and CEO of Silicon Microstructures, require the use of reconfigurable archi- amplified pressure parts with ranges which was acquired by Elmos Semi- tectures. At the same time, the devel- down to 2.5mbar FS. conductor, and founder and Presi- opment of semiconductor technologies dent of Transensory Devices, which and processor architectures has reached The devices feature very low zero-drift merged with IC Sensors, where he the point where it is possible to create and tight parameter distribution, en- served as president, which was sub- user terminals built on SDR techniques abling very accurate low-pressure mea- sequently acquired by EG&G) that are competitive in both cost and surements and are especially key in Dr. Henry Allen, Vice Founder and VP power consumption. many amplified designs. They have a (previously founder and VP of very low-mass diaphragm, which over- Transensory Devices, VP, IC Sen- To capitalize on this vision, Cognovo comes g-force and vibration errors, im- sors, and founder and VP of Silicon has created a software architecture that proving accuracy and reducing the Microstructures) complements the capability of the lat- costs associated with correction est generation of flexible baseband pro- schemes. 47166 Crucillo Ct. cessing engines. At the heart of Fremont, CA 94539 Cognovo’s products are two decades The very small footprint (1.6 to 1.9 Tel: 510.943.6205, Fax: 510.894.7848 of experience in highly parallel proces- 2 mm ) reduces the effects of package www.AcuityMicro.com sor and tools development, combined stress and lowers chip costs while fea- with modem and protocol stack design turing sensitivity and stability exceed- in standards encompassing GSM, 3G, ing that of much larger traditional low Cognovo LTE and TD-SCDMA. pressure sensor die. Cognovo was formed in 2009 to “change the cellular and wireless in- The Cognovo SoftModem Platform is Acuity’s device structures rely on sev- dustries through Software Defined Mo- a fully programmable solution support- eral proprietary process steps to achieve dem (SDM) techniques.” Cognovo’s ing flexible multi-mode modems from higher stability while reducing die size. founding team formed TTPCom over Layer 4/NAS to Layer 0/PHY. The so- MEMS foundry Semefab fabricates the 20 years ago, which grew into the larg- lution delivers software-defined multi- wafers. Semefab is currently building est provider of IP in the cellular world. mode in comparable silicon area and a new separate MEMS fab to supple- TTPCom was floated on the London power consumption to the typical sin- ment its existing fab. Stock Exchange in October 2000, grew gle mode hardware designs that exist The primary competitors are vertically to 700 people with revenues in excess today and in a fraction of the time. Cog- integrated traditional MEMS sensor of US$100M, and was ultimately ac- novo licenses a range of products in- product companies. Acuity argues that quired by Motorola in 2006. cluding silicon designs, software and the emergence of a mature MEMS in- tools to support the Cognovo VSP- Post TTPCom, the Cognovo founders frastructure enables the company to op- based Softmodem Platform. decided to build a business around a erate as a fabless standard product software defined modem. Its search for The SoftModem Platform is comprised MEMS supplier without the develop- processor technology led to ARM and of Layer1 and Physical Layer process- ment, cost, capitalization and capacity in October 2009 Cognovo was formed ing carried out by the L1PHY Com- utilization burden of its vertically in- when ARM transferred its Vector Sig- pute Engine, supported by the L1PHY tegrated competitors. The company’s nal Processor (VSP) technology and runtime software, together with the products offers higher performance and VSP core engineering team to Cogno- Protocol Plane (P-Plane) processing stability. vo in return for an equity stake. Cog- subsystem and Protocol Framework. Additional product families are under novo is currently funded by the The modem hardware is a generic com- development and qualification. The founders and ARM. The company has puting platform, which means that im- company’s focus on high performance 30 employees. plementation of the actual Radio pressure will lead to other special Access Technologies (RAT) standard

Copyright 2010, Pinestream Communications, Inc. 52 Pine Street, Weston, Massachusetts 02493 USA Tel 781.647.8800 Fax 781.647.8825 www.pinestream.com [email protected] SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES JUNE 2010 / 3 is purely a software development task. efficient means of controlling the in- de modems. Key advantages include The Protocol Framework is an object dividual PHY tasks running on the the team’s unique heritage, a combi- oriented software framework to sup- VSP, especially in low power states nation of low-power processor exper- port modular multi-mode protocol such as idle mode and sleep mode. tise from ARM and cellular modem stack development. expertise from TTPCom. Its fully Soft- The Protocol Plane (P-Plane) is an ware Defined Modem approach has Based on the Cognovo Vector Signal ARM processor-based subsystem de- key advantages in the multimode mo- Processor (VSP), the L1Phy Compute signed to support integration of multi- dem market (e.g. LTE plus legacy cel- Engine is a high-level programmable ple protocol stacks and efficient lular modes) where it achieves major computing platform for both Data- inter-RAT operation, coupled with in- advantages in die size, flexibility, and Plane and Control-Plane processing of telligent Layer 2 MAC data process- development efficiency. modern multi-mode wireless standards ing and movement at 100’s of Mbps. in cellular (GSM/E-GPRS, W-CDMA/ In April 2010, the first full release of TD-SCDMA, HSPA/HSPA+, LTE, Development of the modem is support- Cognovo’s technology was released to LTE-A), wireless (WiFi, WiMAX) and ed by two SDKs, one focused on Phys- selected customers for trials. Further broadcast (DVB, DMB, ISDB-T). The ical Layer kernels and a second focused update releases are planned during L1PHY supports LTE Cat 4 (150Mbps on overall system design, integration 2010. downlink, 50 Mbps uplink, 2x2 and validation. Low-level run-time MIMO) entirely in C software at software is provided for the control Gordon Aspin, Ph.D., CEO (previous- 450MHz with peak power consump- plane processor, which is designed to ly co-founder & COO of TTP Com- tion <125mW. support porting of existing layer 1 code. munications) Pascal Herczog, CTO (previously Cognovo provides RAT specific opti- The VSP combines advanced Very Chief System Architect at TTP mized libraries to support physical lay- Long Instruction Word (VLIW) tech- Communications) niques with power efficient vector er development. The initial library Charles Sturman, VP Sales & Market- arithmetic and datapath to fully exploit release supports the LTE standard. ing (previously Director of ARM’s instruction and data level parallelism Cognovo is also in discussions with in- Vector Signal Processor group and in the algorithmic code it executes. The dependent providers of wireless tech- held positions at Acorn Computers, unique capabilities of the VSP mean nology and will be able to offer TTPCom and Motorola) that even highly complex MIMO protocol stacks and physical layer im- OFDM equalization algorithms may be plementations optimized for the Soft- Mark Collins, COO (previously Com- developed in software and executed in Modem Platform and ready for mercial Director and co-founder of realtime at power levels comparable production. TTP Communications) Richard Fry, VP Business Develop- with dedicated hardware. Cognovo targets handset OEMs and ment (previously co-founder and semiconductor platform suppliers. The The Data Plane (D-Plane) subsystem Sales and Marketing Director at HSPA/HSPA+/LTE handset and em- is programmed in high level C code and TTPCom) is able to execute the entire signal pro- bedded market is forecast to exceed Ronny Jonckheere, GM Cognovo Bel- cessing requirements of the modem 500M devices by 2015. A variety of gium (previously Program Manag- from front-end symbol processing to companies such as 4M Wireless, Qasa- er for Ardbeg at ARM Belgium) back-end data packet bit level process- ra, Icera, Sandbridge, Silicon Hive, ing. The VSP is augmented by several Dorfour, mimoOn, Sigmatix, and Blue Building B1, Melbourn Science Park modem-specific processing units (ded- Wonder, to name a few, target the 4G Melbourn icated FEC, configurable RF interface) market with solutions ranging from ICs Royston, Herts SG8 6HB UK to ensure optimal performance. to IP to stacks. Today, Cognovo’s pri- Tel: +44 1763 262477 mary competition is from convention- www.cognovo.com The Control Plane (C-Plane) sub- al hardware-centric designs, either system manages and sequences the in-house at customers or from exter- operation of the Data Plane. The C- nal sources. Elastix Plane is built around a standard ARM Elastix was founded in 2007 “to en- processor and related support compo- Cognovo is wireless-specific but stan- able digital designers to deliver the nents. A dedicated micro-sequencing dards-agnostic and has dimensioned its lowest power or highest performance engine provides a highly power- first platform to support LTE multimo-

Copyright 2010, Pinestream Communications, Inc. 52 Pine Street, Weston, Massachusetts 02493 USA Tel 781.647.8800 Fax 781.647.8825 www.pinestream.com [email protected] 4 / JUNE 2010 SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES Startup Profiles sumption. To achieve this, Elastix uti- to adapt to the process corner and tem- lizes its patent-pending technologies perature (like AVS), and recover part (Continued from page 3) for elastic clocks and elastic voltage of the timing margins set aside for volt- by closely tracking PVT variability.” scaling. These two technologies work age fluctuations and aging which, in The company secured Series A fund- together to minimize power consump- turn, is used to scale the voltage lower ing from Adara Ventures, and in Sep- tion while maintaining the required than AVS. tember 2009, the Spanish operating performance of the chip. administration granted a total award AVS typically results in a 25% power of over 1.5M euro to Elastix and its Elastic clocks track variability, and reduction while EVS results in a 35% partners as part of its AVANZA R&D clock the circuitry to run close to the power reduction. EVS also improves support program for the period 2009- actual speed of the logic. When the robustness, adapting to noise and volt- 2011. Elastix has secured $4.5M to logic runs slow, the clock runs slow, age drops while allowing the device date and is currently seeking Series B and vice-versa. Elastic voltage scaling to continue to run. recognizes that the supply voltage can funding. The company has 12 employ- Elastix Voltage Binning (EVB) is a so- ees. also be scaled to meet performance needs while minimizing power con- lution by which each clock domain’s Low power is a key metric for almost sumption. By constantly measuring the natural frequency at a process corner all chip designs. While there are tech- operating performance of the chip (in is exposed through elastic clocks driv- niques and architectures that can help concert with elastic clocks), the sup- en by Elastix performance monitors. design for reduced power, they do not ply voltage can be dynamically tuned This allows rapid voltage binning of address the fundamental issue of wast- to eliminate wasted power while still dies by simply measuring the elastic ed power caused by variability. The allowing each chip to meet its perfor- clock frequencies on a tester. traditional “design for the worst case” mance targets. Last year Elastix developed an ARM approach exacerbates the problem. Op- Elastic clocks and elastic voltage scal- processor test chip to prove and dem- timizing the design for the worst-case onstrate its technology. Ideal custom- performance corner guarantees that the ing are both realized by inserting a small amount of circuitry into the chip er candidates are developing chips at majority of yielding chips are consum- or below the 45nm node where vari- ing more power than is necessary. design. The area overhead is minimal at < 2%. Elastix software tools imple- ability is an issue and Elastix solutions There can be as much as a 3x differ- can reduce power and improve robust- ence in power consumption between ment the elements for elastic clocks and voltage scaling in the standard ness. Blocks that are active most of the yielding chips that are near the slow time are ideal candidates. corner versus chips that operate near ASIC design flow with minimal im- the fast corner. pact to the usage of existing tools The Elastix tools and technologies are (Magma, Synopsys flows), such as currently being used on real designs Elastix has developed patent-pending logic synthesis, placement, routing, at strategic customer partners. A large solutions that dramatically lower on- timing analysis, formal verification, IDM is currently evaluating EVS. AVS chip power consumption. Elastix’ so- and test. is also in evaluation with another cus- lution leverages variability to reduce Elastix Adaptive Voltage Scaling tomer. Several potential customers are worst-case power consumption and looking at EVB for test bining. lower average power consumption (Elastix AVS) is a scheme by which across all yielding chips. By operat- Elastix performance monitors are used Dugald Stewart, President & CEO ing at the cluster level, the technology to measure the process corner and tem- (previously held multiple executive simplifies global clock trees and perature that the die resides in, and roles at Cadence, most recently as avoids many of the complexity and control a voltage regulator to output VP of Field Operations for the Ca- overhead issues of fine-grain async the minimum voltage that guarantees dence Verification Acceleration handshaking schemes. correct chip operation at spec. frequen- business unit) cy. Keith Lobo, Executive Chairman (22- Elastix’ patent-pending technology year semiconductor industry veter- measures the effects of variability in Elastic Voltage Scaling (EVS) is a an having helped build LSI Logic each individual chip and allows the more aggressive scheme by which (VP/GM), Chips & Technologies chip to dynamically adjust its operat- Elastix performance monitoring and ing conditions to lower power con- elastic clocking technology are used (COO) and Quickturn Design Sys- tems (CEO))

Emre Tuncer, Ph.D., Founder, VP & The LB4 chip family supports a Cur- issues), and the best performance in Architect (previously a CTO and VP rent Control dimming methodology lumens per watt efficiency. Other ad- of Engineering at Magma Design that leads to higher efficiencies. This vantages will be released in the next Automation) takes advantage of the higher lumen/ quarter. Jordi Cortadella, Ph.D., Founder & watt efficacy that LEDs show at low- Jeanette Jackson, founder & CEO Chief Scientist (Professor at Univer- er current levels. (many years of experience in sales, sitat Politècnica de Catalunya The LB4 family can use one, two, service and account management in (UPC), Barcelona, Spain) three or all four of its outputs to con- a variety of industries; established Ajay Jain, VP of Business Develop- trol multiple channels of LEDs and LBT was based on technical devel- ment, 650.776.1185 (previously provide smooth, seamless dimming opments from her father, Vern Jack- worked at LSI Logic, Chips & Tech- from any input, including triac dim- son) nologies, Trident Micro, Quickturn mers. A software approach is used to Ed Sadowski, VP of Business Devel- and most recently Cadence) interpret the triac signal, which allows opment (previously VP of Business 420 Blossom Hill Road, Suite 101 for non-linear relationships, similar to Development at Philips Lighting Los Gatos, CA 95032 incandescent lamps, to be generated. LED Modules & Retrofit BU) LEDs vary in terms of luminous out- Tom Foxall, CTO (30+ years of expe- Sant Joan de La Salle 42, 4th floor put and chromaticity under both Cur- rience in electronics design) 08022 Barcelona rent Control and PWM dimming SPAIN 200 - 3689 East 1st. Avenue methodologies. The LB4 family will www.elastix-corp.com Vancouver, BC, V5M 1C2 Canada adjust for these shifts to maintain col- Tel: 604.299.4421 or and brightness in multi-LED sys- Fax: 604.299.4451 tems; or maintain luminance in single www.lightbasedtechnologies.com Light-Based Technologies LED systems. Using built-in feed forward correction functions and a choice Light-Based Technologies (LBT) was of calibration options, the LB4 can NextOp founded in 2004 to develop control so- compensate for a variety of factors to NextOp Software was founded in lutions for the Solid State Lighting in- maintain a specific color point. dustry. LBT’s mission is “to create a 2006 to deliver assertion-based veri- leading light control company that tru- LBT has partnered with Bridgelux fication solutions that leverage design ly enables mass market adoption of and Elpro Lichttechnik GMBH to and testbench information, allowing SSL.” bring to market the new Gamma line design and verification teams to un- of high performance, energy efficient, cover bugs, expose functional cover- LBT raised $2.2M in Series A funding fully dimmable LED luminaries. The age holes, and increase verification on February 9th, 2010. Key investors Gamma product line features the observability. NextOp has been fund- are Chrysalix Energy and Green An- Bridgelux Warm White RS Array de- ed by angel investors and is not seek- gel Energy. The company has raised livering 3000 lumens. The products ing venture capital funding at this time. $2.575M to date and plans to seek an also feature optical control, mechani- Design complexity has adversely im- additional $5-10M in new funding cal design and a passive thermal man- pacted the ability to have confidence over the next 6 months. The company agement solution from Elpro; as well that the RTL functional verification has 11 employees. as control and power management process is complete. Today’s verifica- from LBT through the use of their LB4 With an estimated 150 million phase tion methodologies include a combi- IC. cut dimmers installed in North Amer- nation of directed simulation, ican residences, triac (phase cut) dim- LBT’s target market size is $90M this constrained random simulation, and ming is especially important due to the year growing to $275M per year by formal and semi-formal methods. massive installed base. LBT has devel- 2013. Key competitors include NXP, Directed simulation, based on ‘black- oped the LB4 phase cut dimming con- Cypress, and ON Semiconductor. LBT box’ checkers that test I/O behavior for troller IC, which delivers a argues that its devices offer superior each feature interaction, is fundamen- significantly higher system efficiency quality dimming (lower light levels tally not scalable due to the number of compared to other triac compatible achievable without flicker or control (phase-cut) dimmer driver solutions. complex interactions between features.

Copyright 2010, Pinestream Communications, Inc. 52 Pine Street, Weston, Massachusetts 02493 USA Tel 781.647.8800 Fax 781.647.8825 www.pinestream.com [email protected] 6 / JUNE 2010 SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES Startup Profiles NextOp recently unveiled its flagship BugScope is already in production use assertion synthesis product, Bug- by multiple semiconductor companies, (Continued from page 5) Scope, after four years of development including Altera, Entropic and Nvidia. Constrained random simulation utiliz- of key technologies and successful es external checkers, which are typi- work with several customers. By au- Dr. Yunshan Zhu, co-founder, Presi- cally developed independently of the tomating the tedious and time-con- dent and CEO (previously a mem- Design under Test, resulting in skipped suming process of generating ber of the Advanced Technology features and interactions. Formal ver- assertions and coverage properties, Group at Synopsys) ification, based on mathematical anal- NextOp BugScope Assertion Synthe- Dr. Yuan Lu, co-founder & CTO (pre- ysis, requires that users specify sis allows design and verification viously a Principle Scientist in En- sufficient properties to cover all fea- teams to finally reap the benefits of terprise Switching Group at tures of the design. assertion-based verification in a time- Broadcom) ly and resource efficient manner. As design complexity increases, asser- 2900 Gordon Avenue, Suite 100 tions and functional coverage proper- BugScope is a full-chip assertion syn- Santa Clara, CA 95051 ties, which are logic statements to thesis product that leverages design Tel: 408.830.9885 define the intended behavior of a de- and testbench information to automat- Fax: 408.715.2573 sign, are well recognized as an impor- ically generate assertions and function- www.nextopsoftware.com tant adjunct to the blackbox checkers al coverage properties for progressive used in simulation and formal verifi- and targeted verification of complex cation flows. Assertion-based verifica- designs. These properties enhance ex- OptiXtal tion enhances directed and constrained isting verification flows by helping de- OpiXtal was founded in 2003 to de- random simulation, formal and emu- sign and verification engineers velop ultra-thin stackable supercapac- lation verification approaches by driv- uncover corner-case bugs, expose itors. OptiXtal has received roughly ing more effective and targeted functional coverage holes and increase $1M in friends and family investment verification. verification observability. and army funding and is currently seeking $5-10M. The company has 5 em- However, adoption of assertion-based BugScope is the first product to auto- ployees. verification has been slow because it matically generate whitebox assertions is infeasible to manually generate an and functional coverage properties in Instead of being tightly wound and adequate number of assertions to the SVA, PSL and Verilog formats. Bug- contained in heavy metal or ceramic level needed for thorough identifica- Scope’s properties are used to drive cylinders like other commercially tion of design problems, and it is un- progressive, targeted verification via available capacitors, OpiXtal’s Su- wieldy and time-consuming to robust, executable design specifica- perXcap capacitors are thin, light, flex- manually create sufficient functional tions for existing simulation, formal ible and can be easily stacked for added coverage properties to identify which and emulation flows. capacitance. SuperXcap capacitors are tests are missing. The high learning rated for 2.7V and come in pouches curve for standard assertions languag- Solutions exist for automatically gen- equivalent to 5 or 25 Farads today. The es such as SystemVerilog Assertion erating assertions based on fixed tem- company can provide SuperXcaps in (SVA) and Property Specification Lan- plates in RTL syntax such as parallel capacitances from 0.1F to 1000F guage (PSL) is a high barrier to adop- case/full case, etc., or blackbox asser- (roughly 1F/Square inch), as well as a tion as well. tions for standard bus protocols. How- wide variety of shapes and configura- ever, NextOp argues that BugScope is tions. NextOp is focused on assertion-based unique in its capability to synthesize verification solutions that uncover cor- assertions and functional coverage SuperXcap 5F capacitors have almost ner case bugs, expose functional cov- properties for design specific control 5x the power density by weight and are erage holes, and increase verification logic. NextOp has a unique use model 1.5x more volumetrically efficient than observability. NextOp’s solutions fit and an innovative algorithm to exam other capacitors. SuperXcap capacitors into existing verification methodolo- the stimulus (i.e. simulation test) to are not sensitive to temperature, deliv- gies such as simulation, formal and create high quality functional asser- er a constant charge from -40ºC to emulation with sufficient capacity to tions and coverage properties. +50ºC, and are rated at > 1,000,000 handle complex SoC designs. charge/discharge cycles. Competitive

Copyright 2010, Pinestream Communications, Inc. 52 Pine Street, Weston, Massachusetts 02493 USA Tel 781.647.8800 Fax 781.647.8825 www.pinestream.com [email protected] SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES JUNE 2010 / 7 advantages include better energy den- Fax: 215-729-1380 quirements, schedules, and die eco- sity ratio, better self-discharge voltage www.optixtal.com nomics (size, power, cost). This ap- characteristics, better weight-to-ener- proach enables fast, accurate product gy ratio, and superior formfactor. planning and alignment to strategic Sapient Systems financial business objectives such as The outer shell is made of a metallic Sapient Systems was founded in 2007 market share, profit margins, ROI and membrane and the flexible bendable to develop software that lets IC indus- breakeven analysis. packets can be configured in a variety try decision makers direct, optimize, of shapes and sizes. Competitive su- Sapient-IC collects data from every or- plan and manage all aspects of prod- percapacitors are generally manufac- ganizational level and offers real-time uct lifecycles, including market re- tured in a battery-like housing with a ‘what-if’ analyses to management. Sa- search, product planning, execution battery-like hard shell exterior casing. pient-IC enables Decision Makers to and discontinuance. The company is visualize “what if?” analysis with a self-funded and has a 24 person devel- The devices have ¼ the ESR (Equiva- single mouse click, generating easy- opment team in India. lent Series Resistance) of many com- to-understand graphs and charts dis- petitive supercapacitors. The 5F Today’s complex SoC designs are “too playing how various tradeoffs will SuperXcap handles 5 amp maximum big to fail”. Decisions Makers need to impact the bottom line. current and is rated with an ESR (DC) evaluate numerous data points to make of 70 m©. Typical competitive 5F units A powerful analytical engine presents and evaluate new product plans and offer maximum amps of only 3.4 amp instantaneous analysis resulting in bet- product lifecycle. maximum current and an ESR (DC) ter decision yields that directly affect of 200 m©. Decision making data is generated by the bottom line of the IC business. Sa- disparate people and systems, such as pient incorporates over 1,000 analytic By delivering a burst of instantaneous endless emails, spreadsheets and ppts comparisons between die size, power, power at the start of battery-driven de- from marketing, engineering, sales, cost, TTM, manufacturing tradeoffs, vices, the OptiXtal SuperXcap can customers, manufacturing and more, and more. A Guardband feature pro- considerably extend a battery’s length making decision making challenging. vides early regression analysis to mea- of service. The SuperXcap re-charges Hierarchies, social structures and oth- sure the sensitivity of the business plan itself in seconds. er boundaries that exist across organi- to schedule delays or growth in die SuperXcaps are also ideal for energy zations impact the information size. gathering process as well. This unstruc- harvesting applications, where they Sapient-IC is a collaborative software tured data model is slow and results in can capture energy efficiently and ex- tool that runs on a Windows platform, poor decision yields due to incomplete pend it in a single power burst to facil- providing data-driven insights to di- or inaccurate data. itate information transmission or rect, optimize, plan and manage all programmed process controls. Su- To solve this growing problem, the Sa- aspects of the IC product lifecycle – perXcaps are more efficient than sys- pient-IC Decision Management Frame- from market research and product def- tems based on batteries, which work provides a collaborative, inition, to design implementation and recharge slowly and typically lose their integrated data management frame- product launch. The integrated plat- charging capabilities after a few hun- work for decision makers in the IC in- form encompasses data integration and dred cycles. dustry to quantify the impact of predictive analytics to evaluate target SuperXcaps were first introduced in complex decision elements in a struc- market size, requirements, schedules 2007. The company has delivered tured and efficient manner. Sapient-IC leading to accurate product planning, small quantities to date and has a cur- is claimed to be the industry’s most and alignment to strategic and finan- rent production capacity of 4000 units/ comprehensive product to provide pre- cial business objectives such as mar- mth. Additional capital is being sought dictive analytics for market, business ket share, profit margins, ROI and to build a production facility. and design executives. breakeven analysis.

Dr. Sagar Venkateswaran, President Sapient’s integrated platform encom- Sapient-IC is available as a free-trial passes data integration, predictive an- download at www.sapient-inc.com. 1901 S. 54th Street alytics and tradeoff analysis to estimate The commercial version is shipping Philadelphia, PA 19143 and evaluate target market size, re- now and is priced at $5K. Sapient will Tel: 215-254-5225, 267.257.8139

tially eliminates dependency on the sil- Using epitaxy, the film thickness can Startup Profiles icon feedstock, ingot, and wafer sup- be reduced to 20 to 30 µm. Conven- (Continued from page 7) ply chain. Active cell area is made tional solar cells are 200 to 300 µm be introducing additional products over through the use of plentiful, inexpen- thick since a thick planar layer has to the next year for FPGA designers, and sive silicon gas, as opposed to costly be produced, which is then structured a comprehensive suite of tools that will bulk silicon wafers. Solexel’s IP also by removing material. Furthermore the provide guidance for management to optimizes mono-crystalline silicon’s manufacturing process takes less time make tradeoffs between multiple de- sunlight capture and conversion effi- and requires lower manufacturing tem- sign choices, e.g., whether to imple- ciency. peratures. The template substrate can ment a design in an ASIC or FPGA. be made of low-cost porous silicon and Solexel’s crystalline silicon-based PV can be used several times. Subash Peddu, Founder & CEO (pre- modules offer the performance, quali- viously held management and tech- ty, and sustainability of the best sili- Imec has granted Solexel a non-exclu- nical roles at Cadence, Silicon con-based PV at the low costs of sive license on selected patents related Image, Phillips Microelectronics, non-silicon based PV. Solexel uses sil- to thin-film solar cell technology. The Lockheed and several other startups icon much more efficiently than tradi- technology relates to a method to de- and founder of Mihira, a design ser- tional silicon-based cells, bringing posit a thin film of monocrystalline vices company specializing in de- down costs and better utilizing resourc- material on a substrate. To increase the sign implementation and definition es to optimize sunlight capture. Mono- efficiency of the resulting solar device, of design processes/flows) crystalline silicon is a highly stable, the method advocated depositing a proven, environmentally benign, and porous Si layer between the substrate 43610 Skye Road abundant material. and the thin film. This porous Si layer Fremont CA 94539 has both light-reflecting and light- Tel/Fax: 510.682.2100 Low material usage allows Solexel to diffusing properties, which helps www.sapient-inc.com manufacture solar modules at substan- confine the incoming light in the thin- tially reduced costs, making solar- film layer, thereby improving the based electricity cost competitive with efficiency of the cell. Solexel traditional fossil fuel-based electricity Mehrdad Moslehi founded Solexel as generation sources. Its approach max- Solexel plans to enter the market with Soltaix in 2005 to develop the founda- imizes the amount of electricity gener- a high-efficiency mono-crystalline so- tion technology and core IP for a new ated while substantially reducing the lar module that will use 156mm2 cells crystalline silicon solar cell. Solexel overall levelized cost of electricity and will consume substantially less sil- was incorporated in February 2007, se- (LCOE), enabling grid parity for mass icon per watt than conventionally fab- cured Series A funding in May 2007, global adoption. ricated wafer-based solar cells. Besides and secured Series B financing in July mainstream PV power panels, Solex- 2008. Investors include KPCM, DAG Solexel has license agreements with el’s technology also enables economic Ventures, Northgate Capital, Ecofin, Imec and Max Planck Innovation production of aesthetically-appealing, Spirox, Technology Partners, Oak Hill, GmbH. high-efficiency, PV products for Build- The Westerly Group, and Univest. Max Planck Innovation has signed a ing-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) applications. Solexel’s mission is to develop “high- co-exclusive license agreement for its efficiency, low-cost, crystalline silicon Porous-Silicon-Process (PSI process) Michael Wingert, President & CEO solar cell and module products for grid- technology. The method is based on the (previously EVP and GM of tied residential, commercial, and indus- production and use of a reusable tem- Seagate, President and COO of trial photovoltaic (PV) electricity plate substrate with a porous structured Maxtor, and CEO of Cornice) surface layer. A thin mono-crystalline generation applications.” Mehrdad Moslehi, Ph.D., Founder, Ex- silicon film is grown on top of the po- ecutive Chairman, & CTO (previ- The company’s approach is based on rous layer by epitaxial methods show- ously founding President & CEO an IP-protected, high-efficiency cell ar- ing the same pattern. Subsequently a until June 2009, his 3rd startup, ex- chitecture and mono-crystalline silicon structured thin film solar cell can effi- tensive experience at ITRC, Honey- material that reduces silicon consump- ciently be separated from the substrate. well-Synertek, GE-Intersil, Xerox tion by a significant margin compared PARC, Stanford, TI, CVC, Veeco, to the current paradigm and substan-

Semizone, and Solexel, and Prolif- which require manual intervention and There is no direct competition at this ic Inventor holding over 220 pat- provide no automation. point, as Vennsa is the first and only ents) company to deliver debug tools that Vennsa OnPoint is claimed to be the Jonathan Michael, CFO (previously automate much of the manual effort. first and only automated debugging CFO for Sonim, Solyndra, TAK Im- Vennsa offer automated debug or au- tool that localizes the source of func- aging, and IXIMobile, and VP of Fi- tomated root cause analysis that re- tional errors without any user guid- nance at Fairchild Semiconductor) moves the need for users to back-trace, ance. OnPoint automates the manual analyze and navigate through the de- Kami Honardoost, SVP of Manufac- tasks of debug and error localization sign. The solution is based on 15+ year turing (previously managed disk at the register transfer level (RTL), of research on this topic and the drive media engineering and oper- drastically reducing the time required founders are top experts in this field. ations for Seagate, Maxtor, and Ko- to locate and correct errors. mag) Vennsa complements other debugging Homi Fatemi, VP of Sales, Marketing, OnPoint picks-up where formal veri- aids in the market such as Springsoft & Business Development (previ- fication tools leave off by automatical- Verdi, Synopsys DVE, Mentor Ques- ously held engineering, sales and ly pointing to the lines of code where ta, and Cadence Incisive, and partners business development roles at Fair- the problem can be fixed. When fail- with many of these companies. child, Intel, AMD, Norsam, HPL, ures occur, OnPoint helps engineers and YDI) quickly identify the root cause of er- Dr. Andreas Veneris, co-founder, Pres- rors and remove the bugs. OnPoint ident and CEO (15 years of R&D 1530 McCarthy Blvd. improves productivity, saves weeks or experience in debugging with more Milpitas, CA 95035 months of effort and guarantees faster than 50 publications and five pat- Tel: 408.715.9554 design closure. ents in that field; associate profes- www.solexel.com sor at the University of Toronto) Once verification fails, OnPoint uses Dr. Sean Safarpour, co-founder, CTO proprietary technology to automatical- and VP of Engineering (previously ly analyze the design and return the Vennsa held ASIC and FPGA design and root cause of errors. OnPoint works Vennsa Technologies was founded in verification positions at Westbay with existing formal flows to automat- Sept. 2006 to develop EDA tools ded- Networks, Vector12, Infineon, Al- ically locate the source of failure at the icated to debugging and error localiza- tera, and Brooks Automation) tion. Leveraging over 15 years of RTL or in assertions and assumptions. Naoto Kimura, President of Sales, Ja- research and patented IP from the Uni- Each error source contains a location pan Region (previously president of versity of Toronto, Vennsa’s technol- in the source code, a hint for perform- Averant Japan K.K. and a sales rep- ogy has been validated by numerous ing a fix, a rank for targeting high pri- resentative of other formal tools in industrial partners. ority sources, a waveform with correction values, and a summary of Japan) The company is funded by private an- debug information. 555 Richmond Street W., Suite 702 gels and a number of government P.O. Box 1201 Vennsa uses SystemVerilog and prop- funds in Canada. In a year or so, Toronto, ON, M5V 3B1 erty specification language (PSL) an- Vennsa may seek an additional $1-2M Canada alyzers and elaborators from Verific in funding. Vennsa currently has 14 Tel: 416.829.0091 employees. Design Automation as the front end for OnPoint. Debugging is one of the most time con- US Office: suming and resource intensive tasks in Vennsa has initially focused on small- 14510 Big Basin Way, #222 the IC design cycle. Debugging ac- er segments of the market like formal Saratoga Village, CA 95070 counts for 60% of verification – weeks verification on its way to much larger Tel: 408.400.3708 ■ and months per design. Today, locat- and more lucrative markets. Analysts www.vennsa.com ing and fixing bugs is performed 100% do not track the debug market; how- Upgrade to Semiconductor manually. Engineers rely on waveform ever, Vennsa estimates the entire mar- viewers, visualization tools, navigation ket to be roughly $500M/year with Times Premium to access aids, and built-in debug features, segments within reaching $100-200M/ our online database of year. more than 1,500 startups!

Copyright 2010, Pinestream Communications, Inc. 52 Pine Street, Weston, Massachusetts 02493 USA Tel 781.647.8800 Fax 781.647.8825 www.pinestream.com [email protected] 10 / JUNE 2010 SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES

was not prompted by any regulatory is- a provider of EDA software and IP, for People sues and is not related to the compa- $315 million in cash. Denali is expect- ny’s financial statements or other ed to have approximately $45 million Conexant has recognized the contribu- reporting obligations. in cash at closing. Denali delivers the tions of Dwight Decker upon his re- most widely used solutions for deploy- tirement from the company’s Board. Quantum Materials announced that its ing PCI Express, USB, NAND Flash Decker joined Rockwell in 1989 and wholly owned subsidiary, Solterra Re- and DDR SDRAM subsystems in elec- served as Conexant’s chairman and newable Technologies, has appointed tronic designs. CEO from the time of the company’s Toshi Ando to the newly created posi- spin-off from Rockwell in 1999 through tion of Senior Director Asian Business CardioMEMS, a medical technology February 2004, when he stepped away Development, reporting to the CEO. company that is commercializing wire- as CEO and continued as Chairman. He Ando most recently served as Director less sensing and communication tech- returned as CEO later that year and re- of Strategic Alliances for W&W Com- nology for the human body, has tired from the position in July 2007. In munications of Japan. Based in Fre- completed a $37.9M financing round. 2008, Decker resigned as non-execu- mont, California, Ando will focus on The CardioMEMS wireless HF sensor tive chairman and has served as a di- promoting alliances and strategic part- is a miniature device implanted into the rector since then. Decker continues to nerships for the broader application of patient’s pulmonary artery using a sim- serve on boards that include Interna- Solterra’s quantum dot and quantum dot ple, catheter-based procedure. The pul- tional Rectifier, Mindspeed, and Pacif- solar cell technologies. monary artery pressure is then ic Mutual Holding Company. measured and displayed using the Car- TiaLinx, a developer of mm-wave in- dioMEMS electronic monitoring sys- CyberOptics has hired Daniel Good tegrated radio and antenna arrays and tem. www.cardiomems.com as VP of Corporate Development. Good beamforming technology, has appoint- previously served as VP, Worldwide ed Dr. Mehran Mokhtari as VP of ClariPhy, a provider of mixed-signal, Marketing and Product Management Advanced Product Development. Dr. DSP (MXSP) ICs for optical networks, for Storage Genetics. CyberOptics is a Mokhtari is a veteran of many advanced has secured $24M in Series C funding provider of sensors and inspection sys- research laboratories in the U.S., For- from new strategic investors Oclaro tems that provide process yield and tune 500 wireless communications ($7.5M), a tier-one provider of optical throughput improvement solutions for companies, and defense industries. communications and laser components, and multiple telecom OEMs. All exist- the electronic assembly and semicon- WiSpry, a provider of tunable RFICs ductor capital equipment markets. ing venture investors participated, in- for the wireless industry, has promoted cluding Norwest Venture Partners, FormFactor announced that Mario Jeffrey Hilbert as president. Hilbert, Allegis Capital, Onset Ventures and Ruscev, CEO and member of the Board, who is the founder of WiSpry, and Pacific General Ventures. In 2009, and Jean Bernard Vernet, SVP, CFO, served as its past president and COO, Oclaro used ClariPhy’s MLSE IC to have both resigned. G. Carl Everett Jr. intends to build on the company’s de- boost the performance of its TL9000 current member of the Board, has been velopment success by beginning to ship transponder for 10G networks. named CEO and Richard DeLateur the industry’s first tunable RF-MEMS has been named CFO. Everett founded enabled products tailored to optimizing ClariPhy will use the funding to deliv- GCE Ventures and has served as a ven- antenna efficiencies, providing in- er a new class of single chip MXSP ICs ture partner at Accel LLP. He has held creased battery life, improved quality that significantly increase an optical several management positions at Dell of service and lower overall costs. network’s reach and tolerance to im- and Intel, one of which was SVP and WiSpry has recently begun shipping its pairments, while reducing cost of own- GM of the Microprocessor Products tunable RF-MEMS devices to a Tier 1 ership for both OEMs and Service Group at Intel. DeLateur is a 20-year mobile handset manufacturer. Russ Providers. The company’s line of 10G, veteran of Intel’s finance team includ- Garcia, former CEO, will continue to 40G and 100G networking chips are ing six years as VP and Group Control- serve on WiSpry’s Board as vice chair- based on advanced MXSP schemes ■ ler of WW Technology and man. such as Maximum Likelihood Sequence Manufacturing. More recently, he Estimation (MLSE) and Coherent De- served as CFO at Fluidigm and Topsin. tection that approach the limits of Funding & IPOs achievable performance. Power Integrations has terminated its Cadence has entered into a definitive Oclaro is a leader in the 40 Gbps CFO Bill Roeschlein. The termination agreement to acquire Denali Software, market, with a leading market-share

Copyright 2010, Pinestream Communications, Inc. 52 Pine Street, Weston, Massachusetts 02493 USA Tel 781.647.8800 Fax 781.647.8825 www.pinestream.com [email protected] SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES JUNE 2010 / 11 position in regional and metro net- the entire modem in software on an holders including Celtic House Venture works. In the Differential Quadrature Icera processor. www.icerasemi.com Partners, Capital E, Emertec Gestion, Phase Shift Keying (DQPSK) and Dif- AIB Seed Capital Fund and angel in- ferential Phase Shift Keying (DPSK) Innova Dynamics, a startup develop- vestors. Movidius develops video edit- space for regional and first-generation ing advanced materials technology and ing and post-production ICs for the long-haul markets respectively, Oclaro cleantech spun out of the University of creation of User Generated Content for already offers Lithium Niobate (LiN- Pennsylvania, has secured $5.5 million mobile social networking. Movidius is bO3) and Indium Phosphide (InP) com- in Series A financing led by Rho Ven- now sampling product to major players ponent solutions. At the sub-system tures and including MentorTech Ven- in the mobile market, and is moving level, the Oclaro vertical-integration tures. Innova’s initial focus is to from development to product deploy- model has resulted in ground-breaking commercialize its flagship patent-pend- ment. Mass production is expected to technology disruption, as demonstrat- ing Innlay technology, which enables begin later in 2010, with mobile hand- ed by Oclaro’s fully-qualified 40 Gb/s the rapid and efficient creation of vast- sets containing those products due to DQPSK 300-pin transponder solution ly improved and unprecedented mate- hit the market early in 2011. Sean for regional and metro applications. Dr. rial properties and devices. Alexander Mitchell, CEO. www.movidius.com Paul Voois, cofounder and CEO. Mittal, CEO. www.clariphy.com Netronome, developer of network flow International Battery (IB), a manufac- processors, has closed a $23 million Crocus Technology, a developer of turer of large-format, prismatic lithium- oversubscribed Series D round of fund- Magnetic Random Access Memory ion cells, batteries, and systems, ing led by new investor DFJ Esprit, and (MRAM), has received an 8 million announced the first closing of its $35 including previous investors Raptor euro investment from AGF Private Eq- million Series C financing round, led Group, Tudor Ventures and Top Tech- uity, CDC Innovation, CEA Investisse- by Digital Power Capital, an affiliate of nology. The round also included investment, Nanodimension, Sofinnova Wexford Capital LP. The Company’s ment from FORE Systems founders Ventures, and Ventech. The new fund- products are used in a variety of sta- Robert Sansom and Eric Cooper, and ing will be used to complete the pro- tionary (including electric utility/smart Analysys founder David Cleevely. duction transfer of its 130nm MRAM grid), transportation and military appli- technology to manufacturing partner cations. The company’s low-cost, wa- The funding comes during a period of Tower Semiconductor and for contin- ter-based manufacturing process avoids record growth for the company, includ- ued product development. The compa- the use of toxic solvents, which are stan- ing a 5X increase in annual revenue and ny has also appointed Dr. Bertrand dard in lithium battery manufacturing five consecutive quarters with record Cambou as CEO and Chairman. Most today. Dr. Ake Almgren, President and sales. Netronome plans to more than recently, Cambou served as president CEO. double its revenue in 2010. Netronome of SST, which was acquired in April began shipping its new flagship prod- Joule has closed a $30 million second uct, the NFP-3240, to customers in late 2010 by Microchip. In previous roles, round of funding, further strengthening he served as president and CEO of 2009. Customer design wins include the company’s position as it advances shared service blades in switches and Spansion, SVP of AMD’s memory from testing to high-capacity produc- group, and COO at Gemplus. routers, 3G and LTE wireless infrastruc- tion of renewable diesel fuel starting in ture, security appliances and virtualized Icera’s investors have provided a fur- 2012. The round includes investments servers. Niel Viljoen, founder and CEO. ther $45M in equity capital to acceler- from undisclosed institutional and pri- ate the growth of its market share. All vate sources that joined Flagship Ven- Sand 9, a startup company developing existing preferred shareholders, includ- tures, Joule’s founding venture capital timing oscillator and frequency control ing Accel Ventures, Amadeus Capital investor. Joule’s Helioculture solar plat- technology for the wireless device mar- Partners, Atlas Venture, Balderton Cap- form converts sunlight and waste CO2 ket, has closed a $12 million Series B ital and DFJ Esprit, participated fully directly into liquid fuels in a continu- round led by new investor Common- in the funding round. Icera’s Adaptive ous process that is not limited by costly wealth Capital Ventures and including Wireless™ modem technology is fo- biomass intermediates, processing or previous investors Flybridge Capital cused today on 3G (HSPA+, HSPA) and use of precious natural resources. Partners, General Catalyst Partners and 2G (GSM, GPRS, EDGE) cellular voice www.jouleunlimited.com Khosla Ventures. The funding will be and data modem chipsets and firmware, used to accelerate sales and marketing Movidius has secured US$7.5 million and expand product manufacturing to with 4G (LTE) scheduled in the near in Series B funding with existing share- future. Adaptive Wireless™ executes volume shipment levels. Sand 9 has

Copyright 2010, Pinestream Communications, Inc. 52 Pine Street, Weston, Massachusetts 02493 USA Tel 781.647.8800 Fax 781.647.8825 www.pinestream.com [email protected] 12 / JUNE 2010 SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES Funding & IPOs Spansion has received funding from entered into a joint development agree- Silver Lake Sumeru, the middle mar- ment with SiOnyx for solar cell manu- (Continued from page 11) ket investment group of Silver Lake. facturing using black silicon developed a Temperature Compensat- Spansion filed for reorganization under processing, which is based upon the ed MEMS Oscillator (TCMO) to re- Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy interaction of ultrafast laser light and place quartz crystal frequency sources Code in March 2009 and successfully silicon in a controlled environment. in high performance applications such emerged from bankruptcy on May 10, as 3G cellular, GPS and other commu- 2010 as a re-organized entity with INSIDE Contactless, a provider of nications. Vince Graziani, CEO. strong operating results and a well cap- contactless secure transaction chip www.sand9.com italized balance sheet. Spansion cur- technologies, has entered into an agree- rently has approximately $480 million ment to purchase for cash consideration Sidense, a developer of Logic Non-Vol- in debt, $230 million of cash and a $65 Atmel’s Secure Microcontroller So- atile Memory (LNVM) IP cores, has million undrawn, asset-backed, line of lutions (SMS) business. Terms were raised $5 million in Series B growth credit. not disclosed. The transaction will be capital financing led by VentureLink financed by the existing INSIDE inves- Funds of Canada and including exist- SunEdison, the solar energy develop- tors led by Gimv and Sofinnova Part- ing funding partners Tech Capital Part- ment division of MEMC Electronic ners, along with the French sovereign ners and Trellis Capital of Canada and Materials (NYSE: WFR), announced an wealth fund, Fonds Stratégique Vertex Venture Capital of Israel. agreement with First Reserve to estab- d’Investissement (FSI). Atmel also will Sidense’s 1T-Fuse single transistor, lish a joint venture that could provide make an investment in INSIDE. The split-channel antifuse technology en- for the acquisition of up to $1.5 billion resulting organization will be the larg- ables the design and development of in current and future SunEdison solar est fabless semiconductor company in one-time-programmable (OTP) or em- photovoltaic energy projects. SunEdi- France, and one of the largest in Eu- ulated multi-time-programmable son is one of the leading solar project rope. INSIDE would enter into a multi- (MTP) memory blocks that are reliable, developers, with more than 350 solar year supply agreement to continue low-cost, scalable and secure alterna- electric power plants constructed and sourcing wafers from the fabrication tives to discrete flash, Mask ROM, elec- under management. First Reserve is one operation in Rousset, France that Atmel tronic fuse (eFuse) and embedded flash of the largest private equity and energy recently agreed to sell to LFoundry memory. Sidense OTP memory is cur- infrastructure investors, with $20 bil- GmbH. www.insidecontactless.com rently embedded in over 90 customer lion under management. ■ designs. The IP is offered at and has M/A-COM and Mimix Broadband been adopted by all top-tier foundries have signed a definitive merger agree- and selected IDMs. Mergers & Acquisitions ment that will add Mimix and its sub- sidiaries to the M/A-COM Tech family Avnet launched a tender offer bid for Solaria, a manufacturer of solar pho- of companies. Terms were not dis- Unidux, a publicly traded company tovoltaic modules, has closed $45 mil- closed. Mimix is a fabless supplier of (TSE: 9897), substantially expanding lion in a financing round led by CMEA GaAs ICs from DC to 50 GHz for RF, its presence and customer base in the Capital and DBL Investors. Other par- microwave and millimeter-wave appli- Japanese market. Established in 1972, ticipants include current investors Sig- cations. Joe Thomas, CEO, M/A-COM; Unidux is an electronics components ma Partners and NGEN Partners and Rick Montgomery, CEO, Mimix; John distributor primarily serving Japanese new investors Mitsui Ventures and Sav- Ocampo, founder of GaAs Labs, LLC OEMs. For calendar year 2009, Unidux itr Capital. Based on its patented low- and Chairman of M/A-COM Tech. generated revenue of approximately cost technology, Solaria’s modules www.macomtech.com, www.mimix US$370 million. provide reliable performance while broadband.com matching form, fit and performance of Coherent (NASDAQ: COHR) has ac- MEMC Electronic Materials conventional PV modules. Its Modules quired Beam Dynamics for $6.25 mil- (NYSE:WFR) has reached a definitive offer crystalline performance at sub- lion in cash. The acquisition enhances agreement to acquire Solaicx, head- stantially lower cost. Solaria is now of- Coherent’s application knowledge and quartered in Santa Clara, California for fering the Solaria module to customers development capabilities, and also pro- $66 million in cash plus an investment in North America, Europe, and Asia. vides a pathway to expand its presence amount estimated to be approximately Daniel Shugar, CEO. www.solaria.com in the market for precision laser pro- $10 million and an earn-out of up to an cessing workstations. Coherent has also additional $27.6 million in cash and

Copyright 2010, Pinestream Communications, Inc. 52 Pine Street, Weston, Massachusetts 02493 USA Tel 781.647.8800 Fax 781.647.8825 www.pinestream.com [email protected] SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES JUNE 2010 / 13 stock. Solaicx has developed propri- value-added reseller customer base, HDTV systems in the market use its etary continuous crystal growth manu- board logistics capabilities, and SSD chipsets. facturing technology, which yields cache performance solutions. Based on low-cost, high-efficiency monocrystal- industry data, PMC-Sierra estimates Ember has reached a key milestone in line silicon wafers for the photovoltaic total channel revenues for x86 RAID its quest to become the foremost pro- solar industry. products to be approximately $200 mil- vider of ZigBee technology for smart lion. Adaptec is the second largest sup- meters and Home Area Network (HAN) The Solaicx technology allows for very plier of x86 RAID products through the products when it became the first com- high-volume crystal growth compared channel. pany to ship more than 10 million Zig- to the silicon ingots produced in the tra- Bee wireless chips. This milestone is ditional precision semiconductor man- Tessera has entered into a definitive reflected in record revenues and sales ufacturing process. Solaicx has agreement to acquire Siimpel, a devel- bookings, making Ember well posi- approximately 80 employees and a oper of MEMS-based camera solutions tioned for almost 300% annual revenue large-scale production facility in Port- for mobile imaging applications, for growth in 2010. ZigBee chipset ship- land, Oregon. The monocrystalline sil- approximately $15 million in cash. Si- ments are projected to reach as high as icon market is forecast to grow at a impel’s MEMS-based auto focus and 192 million units in 2014, up from just CAGR of about 50% during the next shutter solutions complement Tessera’s over 5 million units in 2008, according three years. This transaction positions EDOF technology. Tessera does not to West Technology Research Solutions. MEMC to significantly reduce the cost anticipate a revenue contribution in Bob LeFort, CEO. www.ember.com of monocrystalline silicon. Q2’10 from this acquisition. The company expects to incur additional Q2 Icera could quickly emerge as the third Microchip has sold certain non-core non-GAAP operating expense of be- most successful supplier of LTE base- assets from its SST subsidiary. The tween $1.8 and $1.9 million. bands and chipsets after Qualcomm and product lines sold included NAND ST-Ericsson, reports Strategy Analyt- Drives, NAND controllers, Smart Card Wintegra has filed a registration state- ics. Through its lead in soft modems, ICs, Combo Memory, Concurrent Su- ment with the U.S. SEC for the pro- and the progress it has already made perFlash, Small-Sector Flash and many- posed IPO of its common stock – again. with OEMs in W-CDMA/HSPA embed- time Programmable Flash memories. The joint book-running managers will ded data modems and USB dongles, it The buyer, Greenliant Systems, is a be Barclays Capital Inc. and Deutsche appears that Icera is well placed for LTE new company founded by Bing Yeh, the Bank. success, ahead of Infineon, Broadcom, ex-Chairman and CEO of SST. Approx- MediaTek, the Japanese suppliers and imately 100 employees (18% of SST’s Zarlink has sold the assets of its Opti- a host of start-ups. According to Strate- workforce) transferred to Greenliant. cal Products group to Tyco Electron- gy Analytics, “in terms of size, power, Terms were not disclosed. ics for approximately $15 million in consumption and reconfigurability, cash. This transaction enables Zarlink Icera appears to have a one to two year NXT has acquired Audium Semicon- to focus on network timing, medical technology lead on mainstream suppli- ■ ductor’s IP to create 25W-per-channel wireless and line circuit initiatives. ers Qualcomm, ST-Ericsson and Infin- USB-powered loudspeaker platforms. eon in the slim modem space.” Icera’s NXT, best known for its flat panel loud- basebands and chipsets have already speaker technology, intends to use Au- Business & Financials received positive attention from Nokia, dium ICs to provide customers with AMIMON has surpassed half a million Samsung and LG. www.strategy complete audio platforms incorporating units in chipset sales and orders. AMI- analytics.com its proven Balanced Mode Radiator MON has been experiencing very (BMR) technology together with ultra- strong and rapidly growing demand for INSIDE Contactless announced that efficient power amplifiers. its wireless 1080p WHDI™ (Wireless shipments of its MicroPass intelligent Home Digital Interface™) chipset. payment platform have surpassed the PMC-Sierra has entered into a defini- With a very strong first quarter and 200 million unit mark, with production tive agreement to acquire Adaptec’s multiple new WHDI products to be volume doubling in the 18 months since channel storage business for approxi- launched in the next few months, AMI- reaching 100 million units in Novem- mately $34 million in cash and assump- MON is on track to crossing the one ber 2008. MicroPass is available from tion of certain liabilities. The channel million chipset sales milestone by the all major bank card brand certified man- storage business includes Adaptec’s holiday season of this year. The com- ufacturers in North America and now RAID storage product line, a global pany claims that 9 out of 10 wireless powers more contactless bank cards

Copyright 2010, Pinestream Communications, Inc. 52 Pine Street, Weston, Massachusetts 02493 USA Tel 781.647.8800 Fax 781.647.8825 www.pinestream.com [email protected] 14 / JUNE 2010 SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES Business and eight of the top ten design houses to finally break the 30% barrier once in China. Forward Concepts estimates again in 2010, with revenue set to rise (Continued from page 13) that 78 million broadcast TV handsets to $300.3 billion, up 30.6% from $229.9 than any other core technology avail- were shipped globally in 2009. billion in 2009, according to iSuppli. able in the market. Last year, INSIDE However, unlike the Internet-crazed opened a new operational facility in Telegent is now leveraging its success spike in 2000, growth in chip sales this Bangkok, Thailand to increase its pro- of the last two years to broaden its prod- year will be driven by real fundamen- duction capacity to meet an anticipated uct portfolio of ‘converged TV’ solu- tal supply/factors that slowly have been demand of up to 500 million MicroPass tions. In preparation for continuing gaining momentum during the past 12 contactless payment microprocessors organizational growth, Samuel Sheng, months. Strong sales growth is predict- annually. INSIDE Contactless has de- president and CEO, has asked Tele- ed for 2010 in PCs, mobile handsets, livered more than 400 million contact- gent’s Board to begin the search for his LCD-TVs and other semiconductor- less platforms worldwide. successor, following which he will re- rich electronic systems. sume the role of CTO in order to con- Phyworks, a provider of analog and centrate on further developing and This year will mark an all-time annual mixed signal ICs for high-speed com- expanding Telegent’s technology plat- high for global semiconductor revenue, munication, has shipped its 30 millionth form. In addition, Telegent has with- eclipsing the previous record of $274 chip and predicts revenue growth in drawn its registration statement for billion set in 2007 by about 9%. Dra- 2010 of 90%. The company cites reve- an IPO. www.telegent.com ■ matic growth in DRAM revenues will nue increases in core PON, mobile be a major driver of growth in the over- backhaul and equalizer markets as key all semiconductor market. DRAM rev- contributing factors to its on-going Market Research enue growth in 2010 is projected to success. Worldwide semiconductor sales in reach nearly 77%. Other major growth March were $23.1 billion, an increase drivers in 2010 will be NAND flash SiTime’s cumulative shipments of its of 4.6% from February when sales were memory, analog ICs, discretes, LEDs MEMS First CMOS oscillators and $22.0 billion, reports the SIA. Sales and PLDs. All of these major market clock generators are expected to exceed increased by 58.3% from March 2009 segments are forecasted to attain growth 20 million units in May 2010. SiTime when sales were $14.6 billion. Q1’09 of more than 30% during the year. has 85% share of the MEMS-based marked the low point in semiconduc- timing market, according to Yole Dével- The market for high-brightness LEDs tor sales during the global economic oppement, a MEMS technology con- in LCD TVs will be restricted by a recession. Sales for Q1’10 were $69.2 sulting firm. The report also forecasted shortage of key semiconductor materi- billion compared to $43.7 billion for that the MEMS-based timing market als in 2H’10, according to Strategy Q1’009. www.sia-online.org will grow at a CAGR of 80% from 2010 Analytics. The rapid penetration of to 2015. Rajesh Vashist, CEO. North America-based manufacturers LED backlighting modules in LCD TVs of semiconductor equipment posted has already seen demand soar, for cap- Stacatto Communications is now $1.44 billion in orders in April 2010 and ital equipment, particularly for the met- Veebeam, in recognition of the com- a book-to-bill ratio of 1.13, according al-organic chemical vapor deposition pany’s new focus in bringing to market to SEMI. The three-month average of (MOCVD) reactors used to make galli- a simple, affordable consumer electron- worldwide bookings in April 2010 was um nitride (GaN) LEDs. A similar trend ics device to wirelessly deliver high $1.44 billion, up 8.1% from the final is now evident in the supply of consum- quality Internet video content from the March 2010 level of $1.33 billion, and ables, specifically the metal-organic laptop to the flat screen. 478.7% above the $249.0 million in material trimethylgallium (TMG) and Telegent has shipped 80 million free- orders posted in April 2009. The three- sapphire wafers. Demand for TMG al- to-air mobile TV receiver chips since it month average of worldwide billings in ready exceeds the available supply; thus first launched its mobile TV receiver April 2010 was $1.28 billion, up 16.2% manufacturers need to absorb a 20% technology in mid-2007. Currently from the final March 2010 level of price increase in the near term. A short- Telegent counts among its customers $1.10 billion, and 231.7% above the age of sapphire wafers, upon which more than 100 device manufacturers, April 2009 billings level of $385.7 mil- most blue and white LEDs are pro- including a top three global handset lion. www.semi.org duced, is also likely in 2H’10. manufacturer, two of the top five mo- After the chip business’s 36.7% expan- Approximately 35 million netbooks bile handset manufacturers in Taiwan, sion of 2000, the industry is expected shipped in 2009, according to ABI

Research. In 2010, netbook shipments which integrate 8 to 32 enhanced software and hardware development are expected to reach 58 million while MIPS64 cores with up to 48GHz of 64- framework. The DAN3100 offers a tar- a new element has been added to the bit compute power in a single chip com- geted solution for digital radio designs, mobile consumer electronics market bined with over 85 L3-L7 application e.g. multi-carrier, multi-mode remote equation: the media tablet, initially per- and security acceleration engines, vir- radio head (RRH) products. First sam- sonified by Apple’s iPad. The firm con- tualization features, 100Gbps of con- ples in Q3’10. Oz Barak, CEO. servatively forecasts media tablet sales nectivity, and a new Real Time Power www.designartnetworks.com of about eight million in 2010.■ Optimizer™ that dynamically adjusts power depending upon the application- Freescale has entered the GaAs MMIC level processing requirement. The new market with the introduction of four Emerging Trends OCTEON II processors deliver up to 4x new devices for macro base stations, repeaters and femtocells. The compa- A group of industry leaders throughout higher performance and up to 3x im- ny has introduced an enhancement- the electronics industry have launch the provement in performance/watt over mode pHEMT MMIC low-noise Hardware Intrinsic Security (HIS) the OCTEON Plus processors in a ful- amplifier, two-stage InGaP HBT pow- Initiative, an educational forum dedi- ly software compatible fashion. The er amplifier and two broadband MMIC cated to reduce barriers and advance the CN68XX will sample in Q4. The amplifiers. The new MMICs are the adoption of HIS solutions. The HIS ap- CN68XX will be offered in 16, 24, and first of many planned Freescale MMIC proach provides greater security at a 32-core options. Various members will devices currently under development to lower cost per chip by enabling secure be offered with different hardware ac- cover popular wireless bands and ap- key storage without storing the key. celeration options, speed grades and plications. Gavin Woods, VP and GM, With Intrinsic-ID serving as the man- price points. The CN67XX is pin and RF Division. aging sponsor, members are comprised software compatible with the CN68XX of advisors from the following compa- and will be offered in 8, 12, and 16- Global Communication Semiconduc- nies: Cisco, imec, Intrinsic-ID, Irdeto, core options, and will also sample in tors (GCS), a pure-play III-V com- NXP, SiVenture, TSMC and Virage Q4. pound semiconductor wafer foundry, Logic. www.hisinitiative.org ■ DesignArt Networks, a provider of sin- has introduced a Terahertz diode MMIC gle-chip 4G base station SoCs with ac- foundry process to address the millime- tual field deployments, announced the ter-wave transceiver requirements. Un- New Products first two members of its next-genera- til now, THz diodes have only been Atheros has demonstrated the perfor- tion DAN3000 open SoC family. With available as discrete devices, according mance of its Ethernet-over-Coax (EoC) the DAN3400 and DAN3100 SoCs, to the company. The integration of a solution for last mile broadband access. DesignArt provides system vendors discrete THz diode into a circuit assem- Atheros’ AR7400 powerline chipset with a complete end-to-end develop- bly with other active and passive com- offers PHY rates of 700 Mbps and up ment framework for any type of base ponents required wire bonding, which to 350 Mbps of actual throughput over station product, enabling single-SoC is not desirable. coax cables. The AR7400 complies solutions ranging from picocell access GCS has developed a planar Schottky with the new IEEE 1901 draft standard points to large-scale distributed Mac- diode process with THz performance. for powerline networking and interop- roBTS applications. This fully monolithic process, with erates with the vast installed base of MIM capacitor, spiral inductor, thin HomePlug AV products. Two of China’s The DAN3400, the flagship SoC of film resistor and backside via features, largest cable operators, Jiangsu Cable DesignArt’s new technology platform, is now offered as a standard foundry Networks (JSCN) and Oriental Cable has a patented multi-layer, multi-core process. The THz diode process has Networks (OCN), have adopted the architecture comprised of two com- been demonstrated as a mixer in a W- standard into their EoC specifications. pletely software-defined high-perfor- Band up-converter with a conversion Both operators will deploy Atheros’ mance sub-systems – an embedded base loss of 6 dB, with a LO frequency of EoC technology as they strengthen their station and a digital front-end design for 91.8GHz (12 dBm) and an IF of 2.25 infrastructure to support next- high-output RF applications. The GHz. The process is ideal for applica- generation broadband and digital TV DAN3400 enables Compact BTS solutions in mm-wave frequency transceiv- services. tions ranging from the lowest-cost 4G access points all the way up to multi- ers, as well as Terahertz imaging Cavium has unveiled the OCTEON II carrier, multi-protocol, multi-sector systems. Jerry Curtis, CEO. CN68XX/67XX processor families, macrocells, based on one single R&D www.gcsincorp.com

Copyright 2010, Pinestream Communications, Inc. 52 Pine Street, Weston, Massachusetts 02493 USA Tel 781.647.8800 Fax 781.647.8825 www.pinestream.com [email protected] 16 / JUNE 2010 SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES New Products now enjoy all the benefits of Liquavis- RFMD’s first high-power GaN process ta’s technology across all sizes and ap- was qualified in the June 2009 quarter (Continued from page 15) plications. The latest large area displays and delivers much higher power densi- Integra Technologies, a manufacturer bring XGA resolution (1024 x 768), ty and voltage breakdown than compet- of high power pulsed RF transistors, which combined with video capabili- ing technologies. Additional announced the development of High ties will fuel further breakthroughs in technologies in development include Voltage Gallium Nitride on Silicon the delivery of content and applications MMIC process modules. technology. Leveraging a world-class to eReaders, and more. design team and internal wafer fabri- RFMD has added high power Integrat- cation facility with nearly two years of Menta SAS, a provider of embedded- ed Passive Component (IPC) technolo- R&D has culminated in launch of two FPGA IP, has unveiled eFPGA Creator, gy to its foundry services portfolio. new products. The devices operate over the first complete development tool RFMD’s IPC technology is comple- the instantaneous bandwidth covering suite that allows designers to create mentary to its GaN technology, and oth- 2.7 GHz to 3.1 GHz in the S-band fre- customizable programmable logic ar- er power semiconductor technologies, quency range. Under 300µs (microsec) chitecture. By providing full control for the design of multi-chip modules pulse width and 10% duty cycle puls- over the parameters of the embedded- (MCMs). RFMD’s IPC technology pro- ing conditions, the devices typically FPGA structure, eFPGA Creator gives vides all of the passive circuit compo- supply a minimum of 25 or 50 watts of users the ability to define, build, ana- nents necessary to enable matching peak output power. Integra claims to lyze and validate the target capacity, networks, including MIM capacitors, have developed the first high voltage performance, interconnect density and multi-layer stacked capacitors, thin- GaN-on-silicon HEMT process with programming method. Laurent Rougé, film resistors and inductors. Addition- drain-source breakdowns exceeding founder and CEO. www.menta.fr ally, three metal interconnect layers are 200 volts. Samples now. John Titizian, available for complex routing and in- Percello’s PRC6600 Femtocell SoC is creased current-handling capability. founder and president. www.integra now available. The device is claimed tech.com to be the most powerful digital base- SiBEAM has introduced the first Wire- Kaai announced shipments of its new band SoC for enterprise and outdoor lessHD/WiGig solution, the SB8110 blue laser diode product for display and femtocell use. The chip contains an 800 WirelessHD/WiGig RF transceiver and specialty applications. Kaai’s new blue MHz MIPS CPU and its peripherals, associated SK8100 Development Kit. laser diode is designed for integration femtocell L1 engine (FLE) and embed- Based on both the WirelessHD and the into portable applications such as em- ded DDRs. As a result, it does not re- WiGig standard, the SB8110 is avail- bedded and companion pico projectors quire any external memory or digital able immediately and the SK8100 kit and features 60 mW of 445 nm single parts on the board. The PRC6600 is will be available in June 2010. The mode output power in a compact TO compliant with 3GPP Home Node B SB8110 WirelessHD/WiGig RF Trans- 38 package. Kaai’s blue lasers are based (HNB) specs and is capable of support- ceiver supports both single carrier and on the company’s patented InGaN semi- ing 24 HSPA+ 21.6/5.76 Mbps users OFDM modulation schemes and can be conductor technology and are fabricat- and up to 32 UMTS voice calls at a used to create either a WirelessHD only, ed on GaN substrates. Kaai is a wholly range of 3,000 meters. It also is de- WiGig only or dual mode WirelessHD/ owned subsidiary of Soraa and was signed for optimal outdoor use, support- WiGig product. founded in 2008 by semiconductor la- ing high velocities and receive diversity. Samples now; production in Q4. Solarflare has begun sampling a 40nm ser pioneers Professors Shuji Nakamu- quad-port 10GBASE-T PHY chip. So- ra, Steven Denbaars and James Speck RFMD has qualified its second high- larflare’s fourth-generation PHY, the of University of California, Santa Bar- power Gallium Nitride (GaN) process SFT9104, developed at its labs in Or- bara. www.kaai.com technology, which achieves 1-2dB ange County, CA, has passed testing on Liquavista BV announced the latest higher gain and 6dB greater linearity links up to 100 meters, meeting a criti- development in its range of LCD2.0 than RFMD’s first high-power GaN cal requirement in the 10GBASE-T electrowetting products. The demon- process at moderately lower power den- standard for broad deployment. Under stration of a full color and monochrome sity. RFMD’s GaN2 targets CATV normal 100-meter operation, the 8.5” display, available across the entire broadband transmission products and SFT9104 consumes just 2.5 watts per range of current technology platforms, other multi-market applications and is port. The chip has multiple data center LiquavistaBright, LiquavistaColor and optimized for higher linearity, higher power modes including a 1.5 watts ul- LiquavistaVivid, proves consumers can gain and lower voltage operation. tra-low power and latency mode for in-

Copyright 2010, Pinestream Communications, Inc. 52 Pine Street, Weston, Massachusetts 02493 USA Tel 781.647.8800 Fax 781.647.8825 www.pinestream.com [email protected] SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES JUNE 2010 / 17 the-rack applications. Sampling now; Licensing & Partnerships system engineers to add single-stream production in Q4. 802.11n Wi-Fi capability to embedded Lime Microsystems and AirWalk systems that use Renesas’ R8C, RX and SoloPower, a manufacturer of high ef- Communications, developer of IP- SuperH™ microcontrollers. These so- ficiency thin-film solar photovoltaic based CDMA cellular radio network lutions are based on the Connect-io-n (PV) cells and lightweight flexible so- equipment, have cooperated on the de- and n-Link series of modules from Red- lar modules, announced that the Nation- velopment of a high-performance, low- pine. Redpine and Renesas have col- al Renewable Energy Laboratories cost radio solution for AirWalk’s laborated to provide a Wi-Fi starter kit (NREL) in Golden, Colorado have con- EdgePoint PRO enterprise femtocell. based on the Renesas R8C series of firmed that the Company’s flexible so- Lime Micro’s configurable broadband low-power microcontrollers. ■ lar panels have achieved an aperture transceiver, the LMS6002, supports efficiency of 11%. operation over multiple frequency bands, enabling the development of STMicro has extended its motion-sen- dual band femtocells with frequency- sor portfolio with a 3-axis digital-out- agile pilot beacons while reducing Design Wins put accelerometer that combines band-specific parts count. Gigle Networks announced that Az- drastically reduced power consumption tech Electronics Pte has selected the (as low as 2 microamps; > 90% lower) Peregrine Semiconductor has formed Gigle Networks HomePlug AV chipset with miniature footprint (3x3x1 mm) an exclusive joint development agree- and Mediaxtream technology to create and enhanced functionality. Prod. in ment with IBM for the development Asia’s first gigabit powerline adapter. early Q3; $0.85 @ 100Ku. and manufacture of future generations Gigle’s GGL541 chipset delivers 1Gbps of Peregrine’s patented UltraCMOS™ data rates over a home’s existing AC TowerJazz announced design kit avail- silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) process tech- powerlines using Gigle’s Mediaxtream ability for its next-gen. 130nm SiGe nology. When fully qualified, the next- technology, and simultaneously sup- BiCMOS technology (SBL13) for high generation UltraCMOS RF ICs will be ports 200Mbps performance using in- volume consumer RF applications. The manufactured by IBM for Peregrine in dustry-standard HomePlug AV SBL13 process combines SiGe bipolar the jointly-developed 180nm process at technology. performance with a mature 130nm IBM’s 200mm semiconductor manu- CMOS copper (Cu) backend to achieve facturing facility in Burlington, Ver- SandForce announced a record perfor- high performance RF with more inte- mont. Collaboration between the two mance benchmark of IBM POWER7 grated digital logic. companies began in 2008. systems with SandForce-based SSDs. The benchmark results showed dramat- The technology is targeted at wireless This development marks the first com- ic improvements in processing efficien- RF and digital TV tuner applications. mercial use of 200mm (8-inch) wafer cy and price/performance, using SBL13 is the first SiGe BiCMOS pro- processing for silicon-on-sapphire pro- “multi-level cell” (MLC) flash technol- cess to be built in its Israeli fab, and cess. Migration to 200mm wafers fa- ogy. IBM POWER7 is the first enter- TowerJazz is the only foundry with cilitates the evolution of the process to prise server in the industry to use SiGe BiCMOS in more than one fab. advanced 180nm, 130nm and 90nm SandForce SSD Processor technology. Design wins already secured on this nodes, provides access to advanced platform have the potential for $50M manufacturing toolsets and enables sig- An IBM POWER7 system with MLC to $100M of wafer sales from multiple nificantly expanded digital integration SSDs based on SandForce Processors consumer RF applications. capability. The first 180nm UltraCMOS recently achieved 150,000 transactions RFICs have sampled to a key customer per minute per CPU core running the Wisair will unveil its new 2nd genera- and commercial production release is TPC-C Online Transaction Processing tion WSR602 CMOS single chip wire- expected in 2011. Initial product road- benchmark, nearly a 50% improvement less USB solution at Computex. The maps include configurable RF cellular in processing efficiency per core as new chip offers PCI Express/WHCI in- front ends in the form of high-power compared to the next leading system. terface and additional frequency bands, RF switches, tunable components, and including WiMedia BG1 and BG3, BG4 Siverge announced that its Griffin flag- power amplifiers. www.psemi.com & BG6 upper bands (3.1GHz to ship product has been selected by 9.5GHz). Production in Q4. David Redpine Signals and Renesas an- Raisecom, a provider of telecom equip- ■ Yaish, President & CEO. nounced 802.11a/b/g/n wireless con- ment and network solutions, for the next ■ nectivity solutions that make it easy for generation of its Access products.

Copyright 2010, Pinestream Communications, Inc. 52 Pine Street, Weston, Massachusetts 02493 USA Tel 781.647.8800 Fax 781.647.8825 www.pinestream.com [email protected] 18 / JUNE 2010 SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES Company Financials

Next Qtr Current Qtr Last Qtr Yr-ago Qtr Sales Company Symbol Outlook Sales Net Margin GM Sales Net GM Sales Net GM Growth Qtr Ending Actions Semi ACTS $8.5-9.5M 8 -0.9 -11% 39% 8 -7.5 34% 12 -1.5 34% -35% 1Q10 31-Mar Analog Devices ADI $695-715M 668 167.1 25% 65% 603 120.5 61% 475 51.8 55% 41% 2Q10 1-May Applied Materials AMAT -250 2296 264.0 12% 40% 1849 82.8 38% 1020 -255.4 15% 125% 2Q10 2-May Atmel ATML n/s 349 16.6 5% 38% 344 -83.3 37% 272 3.6 35% 28% 1Q10 31-Mar AuthenTec AUTH $10.4-11.4M 9 -4.7 -51% 49% 8 -3.0 46% 7 -4.5 47% 31% 1Q10 2-Apr Avago n/a Up 4-7% 515 90.0 17% 45% 456 38.0 43% 325 -31.0 30% 58% 2Q10 2-May ChipMOS IMOS Up 17-23% 9 -8.8 -104%-1388% 113 -8.9 -14% 72 -62.5 -52% -88% 1Q10 31-Mar CSR CSR $210-225M 173 3.3 2% 47% 198 20.4 47% 81 -11.3 41% 115% 1Q10 2-Apr Dialog DLG $64-69M 61 4.9 8% 46% 78 19.9 48% 36 0.8 37% 70% 1Q10 2-Apr Diodes DIOD $142-148M 137 15.0 11% 35% 130 14.2 32% 78 -10.8 19% 75% 1Q10 31-Mar Evergreen SolarESLR n/a 79 -23.9 -30% 8% 75 -98.1 12% 56 -64.5 1% 41% 1Q10 4-Apr Exar EXAR $39-41M 39 -3.3 -9% 50% 34 -3.8 50% 24 -4.6 58% 61% 4Q10 28-Mar Ezchip EZCH Up 14 2.9 21% 69% 13 14.9 68% 10 1.4 66% 39% 1Q10 31-Mar First Solar FSLR Up 568 172.3 30% 50% 641 141.6 42% 418 164.6 56% 36% 1Q10 27-Mar GigOptix GGOX n/a 5 -2.2 -42% 49% 3 -7.2 -6% 4 -1.0 59% 29% 1Q10 4-Apr GSI GSIT $23.1-23.9M 21 3.8 18% 43% 17 2.0 43% 14 1.2 37% 56% 4Q10 31-Mar IDT IDTI n/a 138 1.0 1% 48% 143 -7.4 42% 107 -720.7 31% 28% 4Q10 28-Mar Ikanos IKAN $56-59M 57 -4.4 -8% 38% 58 -9.1 30% 21 -6.1 41% 177% 1Q10 4-Apr IXYS IXYS n/a 77 4.0 5% 32% 64 0.4 25% 58 -10.9 8% 32% 4Q10 31-Mar Kopin KOPN n/a 26 1.0 4% 31% 33 5.3 35% 22 1.9 32% 19% 1Q10 27-Mar Magma Design LAVA $31-31.5M 34 -0.7 -2% 84% 31 -2.6 83% 34 -9.9 65% -1% 4Q10 2-May Marvell MRVL n/a 856 205.8 24% 60% 843 204.8 60% 521 -111.5 51% 64% 1Q11 1-May Maxlinear MXL n/a 16 0.1 1% 68% n/a n/a n/a 9 0.0 65% 83% 1Q10 31-Mar MEMSIC MEMS $8.5-9M 7.3 -2 -32% 40% 5.6 -1 n/a 7 0.1 48% 11% 1Q10 31-Mar Mentor MENT $180M 181 -23.0 -13% 83% 237 39.4 87% 194 -13.0 85% -7% 1Q10 30-Apr Microchip MCHP $300M 278 75.7 27% 61% 250 69.4 58% 173 22.0 48% 60% 4Q10 31-Mar Nanometrics NANO Up 37 5.9 16% 55% 26 -0.3 51% 10 -10.6 29% 268% 1Q10 3-Apr NVIDIA NVDA Dwn 3-5% 1002 137.6 14% 46% 983 131.1 45% 664 -201.3 30% 51% 1Q11 2-May NXP —- n/a 1165 -310.0 -27% 37% 1161 -349.0 34% 702 -589.0 10% 66% 1Q10 31-Mar O2Micro OIIM n/a 35 6.0 17% 62% 33 2.1 61% 23 -2.7 55% 51% 1Q10 31-Mar Omnivision OVTI $190-210M 157 3.5 2% 25% 157 5.0 25% 89 -20.1 17% 76% 4Q10 30-Apr ON Semi ONNN $565-580M 550 63.0 11% 41% 497 68.0 39% 379 -33.9 30% 45% 1Q10 2-Apr Pericom PSEM $40-42M 37 3.1 8% 35% 36 2.5 34% 24 0.3 36% 50% 3Q10 27-Mar Quicklogic QUIK n/a 5 -0.1 -2% 61% 4 -1.9 49% 5 -1.6 61% 17% 1Q10 4-Apr Semtech SMTC Up 6-10% 102 10.8 11% 56% 85 9.5 54% 60 4.9 55% 70% 1Q11 2-May Sigma Designs SIGM n/a 65 1.1 2% 49% 68 -2.8 41% 51 2.7 47% 27% 1Q11 1-May SMIC SMI Up 3-5% 352 -181.9 n/a 15% 333 -482.0 11% 333 -617.7 8% 6% 1Q10 31-Mar Spreadtrum SPRD $65-68M 52 6.6 13% 45% 42 1.4 42% 8 -8.3 20% 535% 1Q10 31-Mar Sunpower SPWRA $380-420M 347 12.6 4% 21% 548 -9.9 20% 212 8.5 15% 64% 1Q10 4-Apr Supertex SUPX Up 15-20% 21 1.2 6% 46% 17 2.0 48% 15 0.9 42% 37% 4Q10 3-Apr Synopsys SNPS $330-338M 338 39.5 12% 80% 330 132.8 80% 337 48.3 81% 0% 2Q10 30-Apr Tower TSEM $123-128M 114 -36.2 -32% 14% 101 -31.4 6% 58 -27.9 -29% 96% 1Q10 31-Mar Trident TRID $150-165M 90 -3.9 -4% 15% 32 -23.4 16% 7 -16.6 7% 1210% 3Q10 31-Mar Verigy VRGY $140-150M 120 -1.0 -1% 48% 106 -6.0 44% 71 -30.0 31% 69% 2Q10 30-Apr Vimicro VIMC $19-20M 24 -2.1 -9% 30% 21 .2.1 28% 22 -8.5 21% 7% 4Q09 31-Dec Virage Logic VIRL $26-27M 25 -1.1 -4% 84% 22 -2.2 79% 11 -26.3 78% 129% 2Q10 31-Mar Vishay VSH $660-700M 640.5 45.4 7% 26% 607 28.5 23% 450 -29.1 15% 42% 1Q10 3-Apr Vitesse VTSS n/a 44 -34.1 -78% 56% 42 -34.0 54% 35 -7.1 47% 27% 2Q10 31-Mar Wolfson Wlf.l $30-35M 29 -5.0 -18% 52% 28 -3.8 51% 25 -3.4 50% 13% 1Q10 4-Apr Zarlink ZL Up 3-5% 59 6.3 11% 53% 54 0.1 52% 51 -50.3 48% 14% 3Q10 26-Mar

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Micron – DRAM Barometer SanDisk – Flash Barometer Micron – DRAM Barometer

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Copyright 2010, Pinestream Communications, Inc. 52 Pine Street, Weston, Massachusetts 02493 USA Tel 781.647.8800 Fax 781.647.8825 www.pinestream.com [email protected] 20 / JUNE 2010 SEMICONDUCTOR TIMES Startups In This Issue

✔ Acuity – MEMS-based Pressure Sensors ✔ NextOp – Assertion-based Verification Solutions

✔ Cognovo – Software Defined Modem IP ✔ OptiXtal – Ultra-thin Stackable Supercapacitors

✔ Elastix – Elastic Clock & Voltage Scaling Solutions ✔ Sapient Systems – IC Decision Management Software

✔ Kalray – Massively Parallel Multi-Core Processors ✔ Solexel – Crystalline Silicon Solar Cells

✔ Light-Based Technologies – Solid State Lighting ICs ✔ Vennsa – Automated Debugging & Error Localization Tools

General: Semiconductor Times is published month- Editor: Cliff Hirsch, [email protected] Copyright © 2010, Pinestream Communications, ly. Each issue contains profiles on startups and Inc., all rights reserved. The title and words Semi- emerging semiconductor companies, industry news, Address: 52 Pine Street, Weston, MA 02493 USA conductor Times are claimed as trademarks. No part financial and investment highlights. Subscribers Tel: 781.647.8800 of this publication may be reproduced, copied, pho- receive names, addresses, telephone numbers and Fax: 781.647.8825 tocopied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, or web sites of the featured companies. Email: [email protected] transmitted in any form or by any means (including Web: www.semiconductortimes.com internal distribution) without Semiconductor Times’ Subscription information: $597 for 12 months (12 prior written permission. Copying this publication monthly issues). Payments must be made by a check Schedule: Semiconductor Times is mailed first-class is in violation of federal copyright law (17 USC 101 payable to Pinestream Communications, Inc. in U.S. the first week of each month. et seq.). Violators may be subject to criminal penal- funds drawn on a US bank, credit cards, or wire ities as well as liability for substantial monetary dam- transfer. Call for site licenses and bulk rates. Missing Issues: Please contact us for a replacement ages, including statutory damages up to $100,000 if your issue was lost in the mail. per infringement, costs and attorney’s fees. Payment Acknowledgement: Invoices and credit card Change of address: Notify Semiconductor Times at receipts are included with all orders. Contact us if you least two weeks before address changes. Provide the need a duplicate. Pinestream Advisors old and new addresses and the name of the subscrib- er who is moving. M&A, Capital Raising, and Back Issues: $39 for 1, $105 for 3, $197 for 6, $295 Strategic Advisory Services for 12 and $20 for each additional issue. Reprints: Contact us for details.

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