Founded in 2001, Redpine Signals distinguished itself in the semiconductor startup community as a classic case of how to succeed and prosper without taking VC money. The initial seed funding came from the founders, family and friends. There are just a handful of chip makers which bootstrapped their growth and were able to break out from the design house or IP pack. Later, Redpine made deals with strategic partners without equity participation.
After four years in development, the company's first product was a low-power licensable 802.11b/g platform. One of the first in the industry to launch a single stream 802.11n chipset in late 2007, the company offers several modules and sub-systems in its wireless product portfolio. Today, the San Jose, Calif. headquartered firm operates as a fabless chip maker with a staff of 110 employees -- most of whom reside at Redpine's design center in Hyderabad, India. Its key manufacturing partners are TSMC for fab and ASE for assembly/test.
After four years in development, the company's first product was a low-power licensable 802.11b/g platform. One of the first in the industry to launch a single stream 802.11n chipset in late 2007, the company offers several modules and sub-systems in its wireless product portfolio. Today, the San Jose, Calif. headquartered firm operates as a fabless chip maker with a staff of 110 employees -- most of whom reside at Redpine's design center in Hyderabad, India. Its key manufacturing partners are TSMC for fab and ASE for assembly/test.
Redpine Signals participates in what it likes to call the "inch-deep, mile-wide" Wi-Fi market, not the typical consumer applications where a few Wi-Fi product hits run several hundred million units each. Applications in the Redpine space encompass the concept of Wi-Fi connectivity being embedded everywhere -- the "Internet of Things." Products where the company's embedded chips might be used include sensors, RTLS, medical, smart energy, security, appliance, automotive, industrial and home automation applications, among others.
Venkat Mattela serves as chairman and CEO. Prior to founding Redpine, Mattela was at the Network Media Platforms Group of Analog Devices as director and was responsible for the product, strategy and business development for media wireless connectivity solutions (WLAN, WMAN). He also led the VLSI development from concept engineering to release of multiple industry leading networking silicon products, resulting in a multi-million dollar product line. Prior to joining ADI, he was at Infineon Technologies as director and was responsible for micro-architecture and design of TriCore MCU-DSP processor. He led the team to take the architecture to multiple silicon implementations.
Kalpana Atluri, as president and co-founder (Mattela's spouse), is responsible for the finance and operations in the USA and India. Prior to founding Redpine Signals, she founded Elite Design Systems, a provider of ASIC design consulting services. Atluri has built the founding team and helped create the strategy for the company. Atluri held various engineering positions at Synopsys, Computer Vision Laboratories, CMC Ltd., and Integrated Data Systems.
In his role as senior VP, corporate development, Malik Reddy has been integrally involved with developing Redpine's vision and strategy. Immediately prior to joining Redpine Signals, Reddy founded Netcube Systems, a provider of technology consulting services. Earlier, he has held key management and engineering positions in Pelican, Softec, Sybase, SUN, Oracle, GTE and AC Nielsen.
The most recent addition to the management team, Rajeev Varshneya, serves as VP, business development. Prior to joining Redpine in February 2011, he was the CTO and chief of product marketing for Royal Philips Electronics (Digital Networks and Home Gateway businesses). He has been involved with partnerships and alliances with AT&T, AOL, DirecTV, Echostar and Canal+. Subsequently, he had similar responsibilities for Networked Handheld multimedia products where he managed multiple product introductions in Europe and US, also at Philips Electronics. He was involved in a number of M&A transactions internationally. He was the founder/CEO of the Philips Software business in India. Most recently, he was the CEO of Vigilistics in Irvine, California, a venture backed start-up.
Others on the executive team:
Embedded designers are accustomed to working with easy-to-use development environments. Wi-Fi, on the other hand, is not easy to implement -- often taking 12 months or more to bring a design with WiFi connectivity to market. To alleviate the long development time needed to create WiFi-enabled solutions, Redpine designed-in all the W-iFi software needed for Wi-Fi-enabled systems inside the module, dubbed Connecti-io-n™. The embedded design engineer only needs knowledge of the function calls. Additionally, the modules come "WiFi Certified" for interoperability by the WiFi Alliance and with FCC certification -- alleviating these cumbersome steps need to bring a product to market.
Venkat Mattela serves as chairman and CEO. Prior to founding Redpine, Mattela was at the Network Media Platforms Group of Analog Devices as director and was responsible for the product, strategy and business development for media wireless connectivity solutions (WLAN, WMAN). He also led the VLSI development from concept engineering to release of multiple industry leading networking silicon products, resulting in a multi-million dollar product line. Prior to joining ADI, he was at Infineon Technologies as director and was responsible for micro-architecture and design of TriCore MCU-DSP processor. He led the team to take the architecture to multiple silicon implementations.
Kalpana Atluri, as president and co-founder (Mattela's spouse), is responsible for the finance and operations in the USA and India. Prior to founding Redpine Signals, she founded Elite Design Systems, a provider of ASIC design consulting services. Atluri has built the founding team and helped create the strategy for the company. Atluri held various engineering positions at Synopsys, Computer Vision Laboratories, CMC Ltd., and Integrated Data Systems.
In his role as senior VP, corporate development, Malik Reddy has been integrally involved with developing Redpine's vision and strategy. Immediately prior to joining Redpine Signals, Reddy founded Netcube Systems, a provider of technology consulting services. Earlier, he has held key management and engineering positions in Pelican, Softec, Sybase, SUN, Oracle, GTE and AC Nielsen.
The most recent addition to the management team, Rajeev Varshneya, serves as VP, business development. Prior to joining Redpine in February 2011, he was the CTO and chief of product marketing for Royal Philips Electronics (Digital Networks and Home Gateway businesses). He has been involved with partnerships and alliances with AT&T, AOL, DirecTV, Echostar and Canal+. Subsequently, he had similar responsibilities for Networked Handheld multimedia products where he managed multiple product introductions in Europe and US, also at Philips Electronics. He was involved in a number of M&A transactions internationally. He was the founder/CEO of the Philips Software business in India. Most recently, he was the CEO of Vigilistics in Irvine, California, a venture backed start-up.
Others on the executive team:
- Dhiraj Sogani, GM and senior VP, System Business Unit (ex-Wi2Wi, ICONIC Technologies, Sequence Design)
- Kenneth Lisiak, VP, operations (ex-Analog Devices, Theta-J)
- Ramesh Duvvuru, VP, engineering (Sight Semi, MediaPhy, National Semiconductor)
- Narasimhan Venkatesh, VP, Advanced Technologies (ex-Paxonet Communications, Hindustan Aeronautics)
- Chandra Sekhar Abburi, VP, Systems and Software (ex-Exaband)
Embedded designers are accustomed to working with easy-to-use development environments. Wi-Fi, on the other hand, is not easy to implement -- often taking 12 months or more to bring a design with WiFi connectivity to market. To alleviate the long development time needed to create WiFi-enabled solutions, Redpine designed-in all the W-iFi software needed for Wi-Fi-enabled systems inside the module, dubbed Connecti-io-n™. The embedded design engineer only needs knowledge of the function calls. Additionally, the modules come "WiFi Certified" for interoperability by the WiFi Alliance and with FCC certification -- alleviating these cumbersome steps need to bring a product to market.
Connect-io-n (TM) Module Usage Model
Ascom i62 Wi-Fi Phone All the major embedded microcontroller suppliers use Repine's module with the exception of Microchip, which acquired a Wi-Fi startup, ZeroG Wireless, in January 2010. MPU vendors use the Redpine module in their reference boards and provide indirect sales support for the module via their salesforce.
In recent developments, Redpine Signals launched the industry's first simultaneous dual-band and high performance 450 Mbps 3x3 802.11n chipset for digital home and enterprise applications. Dubbed, the Maxi-Fi® BEAM450TM suite of highly integrated semiconductor products conforming to the 802.11n standard, it is the industry's first MIMO chipset to support "software configurable simultaneous dual-band." This patent pending feature enables the system integrators to re-configure the MIMO chipset on-the-fly from a 3-Spatial Stream 450Mbps 3x3 system (working in either 2.4GHz or 5GHz ISM bands) into a simultaneous dual-band system with 150Mbps in one band and 300Mbps in the other band. Simultaneous dual-band enables robust QoS provisioning for demanding video applications in crowded wireless environments. The chipset touts over 300Mbps of TCP data throughput on various host platforms and runs on the 802.11n MAC on Redpine's proprietary four-threaded processor (ThreadArch®) with very low-host overhead. Chips will begin sampling in the third quarter of 2011 with volume production ramping in Q1, 2012.
Ascom, a 60-year-old Swedish systems company, introduced the world's first VoWi-Fi, low-power, 5GHz wireless phone operating on the 802.11n network. Dubbed, the Ascom i62, the phone uses the Redpine Signals chipset. VoWi-Fi is a Wi-Fi based VoIP phone -- it is the wireless version of the Internet based VoIP service. VoWiFi phones are relatively inexpensive to operate. It is much cheaper to submit audio as data packets over the Internet and it uses considerably less bandwidth. These are reasons why VoIP technology is gaining in strength and momentum. Not to be confused with VoIP cordless phones, VoWi-Fi can access hot spots, while VoIP cordless cannot.
Of significant note, Redpine Signals partnered with Cypress Semiconductor to provide low-power 802.11n Wi-Fi I/O connectivity for PSoC3 and PSoC5 microcontroller platforms. The jointly-developed connectivity solutions were based on the Connect-io-nTM modules from Redpine. The Connect-io-n 802.11n modules are self-contained and system designers do not have to have a detailed knowledge of Wi-Fi technology to use them, thus enabling the widespread adoption of Wi-Fi connectivity in embedded systems.
Cypress customers can readily integrate the modules into any existing PSoC 3- or PSoC 5-based systems with minimal memory footprint and processor load on the host. The Redpine module products offer SPI and UART interfaces and provide wireless connectivity up to 10Mbps on the SPI interface, or up to 4Mbps on the UART interface.
In addition to Cypress Semiconductor, Redpine offers USB 2.0 and PCIe reference designs for Freescale and Renesas controllers, as well. They include software that makes the Wi-Fi link appear as an I/O device for developers, making the embedded design process much more palatable for embedded engineers. Redpine has a close development relationship with Renesas which have jointly developed 802.11a/b/g/n wireless-connectivity solutions to add low-power, single-stream 802.11n Wi-Fi capability to embedded systems that use Renesas Electronics' RL78 MCUs, as well as SuperH and RC8 and RX MCUs.
In April 2011, Arcturus Networks, Encore Software and Redpine Signals announced the availability of an enhanced, bundled software solution for wired or wireless digital voice applications. The solution is the product of a three-way collaboration that has resulted in a highly optimized system-level solution available for Freescale Semiconductor's advanced MCF5301x voice processor family. The solution is geared toward industrial and consumer digital voice applications including VoIP devices, intercom systems, access control applications, healthcare and point-of-sale devices.
Highlighting one of the company's key milestones, Redpine was one of seven companies to be W-iFi Direct certified. The other six (Broadcom, Atheros, Intel, Ralink, Realtek, and Marvel) were were significantly larger enterprises companies.
Redpine Signals' prospects became brighter in 2011 as two of the largest Wi-Fi players, Ralink and Atheros, were acquired. Since its inception, Redpine did not target its chips for the mainstream mobile phone market since it was dominated by large established semiconductor vendors with large volumes and small margins. The company built its chips to service the mobile phone market using the same technology that was developed for mobile phones using embedded Wi-Fi. Today, to avoid competition, Redpine is focusing its product strategy on new emerging areas in the mobile market with a significant differentiated mobile chipset.
Countering the prevailing trends, rather than use ARM or MIPS IP for its processor core, Redpine pioneered its own proprietary multi-threaded architecture optimized for wireless -- a project that was four years in the making. Over 100 patents are in the pipeline with 35 pending and 20 awarded.
In recent developments, Redpine Signals launched the industry's first simultaneous dual-band and high performance 450 Mbps 3x3 802.11n chipset for digital home and enterprise applications. Dubbed, the Maxi-Fi® BEAM450TM suite of highly integrated semiconductor products conforming to the 802.11n standard, it is the industry's first MIMO chipset to support "software configurable simultaneous dual-band." This patent pending feature enables the system integrators to re-configure the MIMO chipset on-the-fly from a 3-Spatial Stream 450Mbps 3x3 system (working in either 2.4GHz or 5GHz ISM bands) into a simultaneous dual-band system with 150Mbps in one band and 300Mbps in the other band. Simultaneous dual-band enables robust QoS provisioning for demanding video applications in crowded wireless environments. The chipset touts over 300Mbps of TCP data throughput on various host platforms and runs on the 802.11n MAC on Redpine's proprietary four-threaded processor (ThreadArch®) with very low-host overhead. Chips will begin sampling in the third quarter of 2011 with volume production ramping in Q1, 2012.
Ascom, a 60-year-old Swedish systems company, introduced the world's first VoWi-Fi, low-power, 5GHz wireless phone operating on the 802.11n network. Dubbed, the Ascom i62, the phone uses the Redpine Signals chipset. VoWi-Fi is a Wi-Fi based VoIP phone -- it is the wireless version of the Internet based VoIP service. VoWiFi phones are relatively inexpensive to operate. It is much cheaper to submit audio as data packets over the Internet and it uses considerably less bandwidth. These are reasons why VoIP technology is gaining in strength and momentum. Not to be confused with VoIP cordless phones, VoWi-Fi can access hot spots, while VoIP cordless cannot.
Of significant note, Redpine Signals partnered with Cypress Semiconductor to provide low-power 802.11n Wi-Fi I/O connectivity for PSoC3 and PSoC5 microcontroller platforms. The jointly-developed connectivity solutions were based on the Connect-io-nTM modules from Redpine. The Connect-io-n 802.11n modules are self-contained and system designers do not have to have a detailed knowledge of Wi-Fi technology to use them, thus enabling the widespread adoption of Wi-Fi connectivity in embedded systems.
Cypress customers can readily integrate the modules into any existing PSoC 3- or PSoC 5-based systems with minimal memory footprint and processor load on the host. The Redpine module products offer SPI and UART interfaces and provide wireless connectivity up to 10Mbps on the SPI interface, or up to 4Mbps on the UART interface.
In addition to Cypress Semiconductor, Redpine offers USB 2.0 and PCIe reference designs for Freescale and Renesas controllers, as well. They include software that makes the Wi-Fi link appear as an I/O device for developers, making the embedded design process much more palatable for embedded engineers. Redpine has a close development relationship with Renesas which have jointly developed 802.11a/b/g/n wireless-connectivity solutions to add low-power, single-stream 802.11n Wi-Fi capability to embedded systems that use Renesas Electronics' RL78 MCUs, as well as SuperH and RC8 and RX MCUs.
In April 2011, Arcturus Networks, Encore Software and Redpine Signals announced the availability of an enhanced, bundled software solution for wired or wireless digital voice applications. The solution is the product of a three-way collaboration that has resulted in a highly optimized system-level solution available for Freescale Semiconductor's advanced MCF5301x voice processor family. The solution is geared toward industrial and consumer digital voice applications including VoIP devices, intercom systems, access control applications, healthcare and point-of-sale devices.
Highlighting one of the company's key milestones, Redpine was one of seven companies to be W-iFi Direct certified. The other six (Broadcom, Atheros, Intel, Ralink, Realtek, and Marvel) were were significantly larger enterprises companies.
Redpine Signals' prospects became brighter in 2011 as two of the largest Wi-Fi players, Ralink and Atheros, were acquired. Since its inception, Redpine did not target its chips for the mainstream mobile phone market since it was dominated by large established semiconductor vendors with large volumes and small margins. The company built its chips to service the mobile phone market using the same technology that was developed for mobile phones using embedded Wi-Fi. Today, to avoid competition, Redpine is focusing its product strategy on new emerging areas in the mobile market with a significant differentiated mobile chipset.
Countering the prevailing trends, rather than use ARM or MIPS IP for its processor core, Redpine pioneered its own proprietary multi-threaded architecture optimized for wireless -- a project that was four years in the making. Over 100 patents are in the pipeline with 35 pending and 20 awarded.
| Redpine's founding in 2001 came amid a turbulent landscape in the IT world. The upheaval that followed the Tech Wreck was also a catalyst for the company. The downtime in the industry gave the founders of Redpine time to develop the technology with more ready access to resources and outsourced talent. At an early stage, the company recognized the merits of setting up a design center operation in India. Coupled with Silicon Valley talent in business and marketing management, it was an effort to get the best of both worlds. The India center gave Redpine access to an initially inexperienced but highly educated engineering pool with a longer term potential to keep development costs very competitive. In addition to its hand-picked development team in India, the company maintains student co-op program associations with universities in the US. Rather than seeking VC funding at a time when VCs themselves were fighting for survival, Redpine initially licensed its initial wireless LAN technology to large semiconductor makers who were selling large numbers of devices. The engineering and license fees were used to fund the company's R&D efforts in India to develop proprietary products. In 2000, more than 60 Wi-Fi chip companies were in existence vying for a piece of the market. Today, there are less than a dozen and Redpine is one of survivors with a strategy to avoid battling the giants. The company has done a creditable job in its external communications activities with active participation in trade shows in the USA, Europe and Asia and well established public relations program. Contact: Redpine Signals 2107 North First Street, Suite #680, San Jose, California 95131 Tel: +1-408-748-3385 Fax: +1-408-705-2019 Redpine Signals India Development Center Gate No. 395, Plot No. 87&88 Sagar Society, Road No.2, Tel:+91 (0)40 44661000 Fax: +91 (0)40 23550722 |  |
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