Shrinking Violence Blog

Geir Førre, founder and CEO of low-power microcontroller startup Energy Micro was in no hurry to raise venture funding for his company. Having sold his previous startup Chipcon to Texas Instruments, he was able to use his own money to get Energy Micro off the ground for around. And with some money from the Norwegian government and lead customers, the company had $6m to get to its first product launch, the EFM32 Gecko that appeared last year.

It took $3m, according to Førre, to get the Gecko out of the door and employ, as of October, around 30 people. The remainder was seen as enough to get the company to the middle of this year and has since taken on some more people, taking its headcount to 35. To get further, the company has raised $13m in venture funding. Last year, Førre said Energy Micro was looking for around $10m, arguing that it need not take much to get a fabless startup off the ground and into revenue.

Talking about the initial funding needed for the company, Førre noted: “People say: ‘That’s outrageous. You need far more money to bring up a semiconductor company’. I say: ‘yes, we can do that’.”

Førre said the company spent around $3m to get the EFM32 to market and had “just south of” 30 staff working at its launch. That figure has now risen to 35. The device is built using TSMC’s 0.18µm ultralow-leakage (180ULL) process.

“In reality, even though we are working on very aggressive process technology, mask cost is a small fraction of the money you are burning. The cost is primarily the labour,” Førre said, adding that the company went straight to a full mask, without pursuing the cheaper multiproject wafer option first.

“All of the digital functionality was tested out on FPGA and we used extensive mixed-signal simulation. If you tell people you are designing for a test chip, they will work to that,” said Førre, so he was keen to ensure that the first chip produced at fab should be the real product.

According to Førre, Chipcon spent around $9m before it turned in a profit and was ultimately bought by Texas Instruments.

When Swiss startup Innovative Silicon first got going, the company argued that its memory technology could be the thing that drives people towards silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers. Despite a strong push by companies such as AMD and IBM, SOI remains a minority choice. All the rest of the action is on bulk silicon wafers.

Following a shift from trying to license its one-transistor memory technology for use alongside logic transistors on system-on-chip (SoC) devices - AMD was the first major licensee — ISi decided a year or two ago that it had a better chance of getting DRAM makers to adopt it before trying to tackle the embedded-memory market again some time in the future.

The DRAM makers have had to come up with increasingly exotic ways to squeeze the bit-storage capacitor into tighter and tighter spaces. ISi is betting that one day real soon now, space is going to win that battle.

By storing a much smaller charge in the body of a transistor, ISi’s Z-RAM could potentially save space — you only have to have a 1T cell, not a 1T-1C cell as with conventional DRAM. But DRAM makers are not in a hurry to move to SOI — they like their wafers to be cheap.

So, ISi has moved in the other direction: away from SOI and into bulk silicon.

STMicrolectronics has recruited US-based EDA company Mentor Graphics to a French R&D programme as part of a plan to have processes down to 20nm running at Crolles by the time the programme finishes in three years.

The Nano2012 programme originally included just ST and its fab at Crolles and the CEA-Leti research institute based nearby in Grenoble. But, with ST having joined the IBM alliance of companies developing sub-45nm processes, the Nano2012 programme has become more international in scope. IBM joined the team with Dutch lithography equipment maker ASML also opting to become part of the programme.

On the conference call to discuss the deal, Mentor president Greg Hinckley was keen to stress the company’s French credentials. The EDA vendor has more than 100 engineers based in the country and will recruit a further 20 to work on the DeCADE project that forms part of the Nano2012 programme. But the deal means a bit more than R&D jobs in France.

The project will include the development of a 28nm chip within two years that will be made at Crolles. By joining the programme, Hinckley said Mentor will have unprecedented access to real-world issues in design with advanced processes. It provides “an opportunity to try out ideas and algorithms”, Hinckley said. “Mentor will be able to immediately validate EDA techniques for 28nm and below and critical, adjacent technologies such as mixed-signal, RF and 3D packaging.”