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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.

This is the last time a graph like this will appear for a while. Because Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing is now part of Globalfoundries there won’t be an opportunity to get information on the processes the company is running from financial reports. AMD will only report profit or loss in its figures now that the company has switched to equity accounting even though AMD holds the lion’s share of the key stock class that determines overall ownership.

Now that the results are in for 2009, it’s possible to see what effect the semiconductor industry’s bungee recession (thanks to Future Horizons’ Malcolm Penn for the inspiration for the phrase) has had on the shift towards more advanced processes. What’s interesting about the first set of charts is that you’d hardly know the foundries practically turned their machines off for a couple of quarters.

Utilisation plunged to 30 per cent in the dark days of early 2009 before bouncing back to near capacity by the middle of the year. Had it not been for TSMC’s 40nm yield problems, the transition towards 40/45nm processes might have been a bit quicker. But the severity of the recession arguably gave the number-one foundry a bit of breathing space, arguably helped by the better yield on more expensive flip-chip packages that the 40G-process chips would typically go into.

Micromachined chips promise much, which is why every time they turn up in a new system — such as the Nunchuk controller in the Nintendo Wii or the motion sensor in the iPhone — it’s tempting to herald a new dawn for MEMS. It’s invariably a case of “this time it’s all going to happen for MEMS”.

But some big problems still face MEMS. It’s not as cheap to make as you’d expect and the one thing you’d expect manufacturers would have down to a fine art — integration with other microelectronics — is still not easy to do. It’s even hard to package the things. They often need to be carefully sealed using special caps to stop moisture disrupting their delicate inner workings.

The seven-strong team at Barcelona-based startup Baolab reckon they have an answer to at least some of these problems. Having already developed a novel type of MEMS structure — basically a floating bar in an electrostatic box — several years ago, the company was faced with the problem of making it commercially viable.