InsideChips - Startups

MegaChips

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 01:30:23 GMT

MegaChips, a 20+ year chip company, is not well know in the USA but it has managed to make the transition to be a successful international chip company. EETimes wrote up a detailed article on this company.

MegaChips: Japan's Best Kept Secret

Zenverge

Fri, 05 Jul 2013 23:57:57 GMT

Zenverge founders, Amir Mobini and Tony Masterson, honed up on their MPEG technology prowess with startup iCompression (founded 1996) and later at Globespan which acquired the startup in May 2000 for $400 million -- just as the tech boom was peaking. Working together for 14 years, they were developing MPEG encoding products which became a hot tech subject in the late 1980s and PVRs were making their debut in the consumer market. At iCompression, the pair worked on low-cost, real-time MPEG2 video/audio/system encoders for consumer and PC markets. At Globespan, Mobini served as an engineering director and helped develop the world's first fully integrated MPEG-2 encoder and codec ICs. Eventually, GlobespanVirata spun out the video technology to form Conexant Systems and its MPEG encoding business ramped up to about $30 million annual run rate by 2005.

By the middle of the decade, the semiconductor industry had gone through massive reorganizations as the then hyper-valued chip entities were deflated by investors. Valuations nose-dived and the industry went through a retrenchment and consolidation period.

In 2005, Mobini and Masterson decided to form their own venture but the operation did not officially start until January 2006 The foundation of the company, then named Xilient, emerged from analyzing the video trends and upcoming technologies at the time, such as the emergence of h.264, HD, and others. In essence, MPEG content was being broadcast to the home and it needed to be distributed to other devices and screens without running extra wiring and putting expensive set-top boxes (STBs) around the house.

Prior to iCompression, Mobini did engineering stints at Oak Technology and IBM. Masterson, earlier, held IC development posts at workstation maker, SGI, and at Apple Computer.

As a historical footnote, Xilient was renamed to Zenverge in 2009 because Xilinx claimed that the first part of the company's named, i.e., "Xili" caused possible confusion. We would speculate that the new name Zenverge is intended to signify the act of making an intuitive convergence ('Zen') of all the different media formats.

Most broadcast content today is either MPEG2 or AVC but with high resolutions, such as 1080i. With its technology, Zenverge can process 4 HD streams simultaneously to any bit-rate, any resolution or profile -- each having a totally independent profile (MPEG2 or AVC). The founders looked around the landscape and saw that other companies were doing transcoding but in ways that were not cost-effective and took up significant die area. A video transcoder takes video in one format and converts it into a different format with the goal of bit-rate reduction, resolution change and/or format conversion.

Zenverge's transcoding process is done in a single IP block. The company realized when video is being processed, either on the encode or decode side, it could have huge bandwidth constraints on the memory. To mitigate it, the Zenverge design minimizes the memory requirement during the processing. The company claims it needs only two DDR memory parts compared to four from other vendors to process four video streams. The company calls it the "TransAll™ transcoding engine."

By 2006, the company was able to prove its technology concept which entailed audio/video processing at lower cost to meet the consumer price points. The company was formed with the premise to take multiple channels of HD, process the streams, and fit the content into the available channel bandwidth of the target device. The content operators also saw the opportunity to bring a single gateway to the house and distribute the content throughout the house from the gateway--realizing significant money savings from not having a $300 set-top-box (STB) located at every TV. Additionally, the single gateway model eliminates truck rolls, further saving cost for the operator. The gateway also enabled streaming content to tablets and smartphones. By the nature of the technology's efficient compression, operators were also set to benefit from being able to store significantly more content in the same size disk drive. The gateway enables consumers to attach their own hardware to the network. For them, an advantage of the gateway is the elimination of extra smartcards or cable cards since one card is shared by the gateway --resulting in typically $100 savings in a 4 STB home.

The operators started to adopt the gateway model four years ago and Zenverge sees this model being adopted worldwide. The first gateway devices are expected to hit the market later in 2013. Zenverge announced the XG5 gateway product based on Zenverge chips for Comcast's gateway box which Harris is building for them. Motorola also announced a gateway box in conjunction with Verizon.

The gateway box is a single box that handles all video data and voice services. Its sits where broadband connection enters the house and connects the home network, mostly over MoCA coax infrastructure. Content is streamed to all devices/TVs in the house with a thin client and to tablets/smartphones using WiFi. In the short term, customers will be relying on the operators to supply the modem precluding the ability to buy a third-party modem which may be better and save on modem rental charges. Longer term, Zenverge believes that these devices will be available at retail also.

The company will be also benefitting from the trend in open source set-top-boxes. Currently, it takes about two years to deliver a new set-top box from the design stage into a customer's home. However, over the past few years, Comcast has been developing its Comcast Reference Development Kit (RDK) to cut that innovation cycle in half. The Comcast RDK was developed internally using open-source components and by working with various vendors. The RDK is a community-based project that allows developers, vendors and cable operators to use a defined stack of software on one layer in order to provision set-top boxes and gateways. The effort is somewhat analogous to the Android OS deployment which accelerated the market penetration of new devices.

The first early operator adopter in the USA was Tivo which build a gateway-like adaptor that attaches to the home network. The unit connects to the user's wireless router and sees the user's Tivo DVR boxes on the home network. It streams from those DVRs either the tuner or the stored content on the hard disk drives to tablets and syncs the content for later viewing on the tablet. Tivo ships products for the retail market and has business relationships with pay TV providers.

Tivo has various pay-TV industry relationships, such as RCN and SuddenLink.   The company also made cable deals with U.S. partners Mediacom, Midcontinent, and Cable ONE to expand its partner footprint. Overseas it made deals with Virgin Media in the U.K., ONO in Spain, and Com Hem in Scandinavia.

The Arris Group has designed in the ZN200 for a new class of 'headless' video gateway box that is based on Comcast's XG5 RDK.   The ARRIS MG2402 Gateway was on display CES six months ago. The box is considered headless because it does not do video rendering functions which 'headed' set-top boxes perform.

Motorola Mobility LLC-made Televation, a cableCard based system has Zenverge designed in. Comcast markets the product under the AnyPlay brand. Motorola, which is a C-round strategic investor, is working on a multi-stream version of Televation.

Earlier, Zenverge chips were incorporated in an LG product in Korea and in an SKnet product in Japan.

The early stage funding came from Doll Capital Management (DCM) and Norwest Venture Partners (NV).

In April 2010, Zenverge's C funding round saw its funding stash increase by $30 million. Led by Battery Ventures, past investors, DCM, NVP, and Motorola Ventures joined in the financing.

The series D funding came to fruition in May 2011 totaling $20.5 million. The round was led by fabless semiconductor company Entropic Communications (NASDAQ: ENTR), with participation from new investors, CID Group and Woodside Fund and existing investors DCM, Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Motorola Mobility Ventures, and Battery Ventures. Entropic put in $10 million of the total. We would consider the Entropic cash infusion strategic because of Entropic's co-development program with Zenverge. San Diego-based Entropic wants to put its MoCA functionality on the same silicon with Zenverge's transcoding technology.

As part of a comprehensive development deal inked in May 2011, the Entropic and Zenverge are co-developing solutions and aligning product roadmaps for the delivery of content with powerful transcoding technology over a MoCA® 2.0 (Multimedia over Coax) home network. Entropic's investment in Zenverge attests to the importance of the deal.

The partnership with Zenverge allows Entropic add more functions to its chips -- making them more attractive to set top box makers. The San Diego company faces stiff competition from Irvine digital signal chip giant Broadcom. While Entropic's latest version of whole-home DVR chips are more powerful than Broadcom's, Entropic faces a market hurdle because it sells its chips on a stand- alone basis. Broadcom, on the other hand, integrates its whole-home DVR technology into a chip set that powers several other functions inside set top boxes. Manufacturers tend to prefer integrated chips because it lessens the risk that components from different suppliers won't work together.

In August 2012, another strategic round of financing was received from Verizon Investments LLC, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications, with participation from Zenverge's existing investors. Verizon Investments is an affiliate of Verizon Ventures, the strategic venture capital arm for Verizon.

All in all, InsideChips believes that about $80 million has been invested in Zenverge to date in five funding rounds. Zenverge is using the funds to accelerate support and growth to expand adoption for its existing products, develop unified solutions for the cable, telco and satellite markets with Entropic and continue its development activities.

Zenverge's current flagship product is the ZN200 which is touted as the world's most advanced quad-stream content network SoC which can transcode up to four HD streams at the same time with the least amount of DDR memory of any part in the market today. Zenverge chose four HD streams in its chip functionality because content operators typically have four devices in the home.

Features of the ZN200 include:
Quad Stream HD Transcoder SOC or Co-processor
Multi-format video encode and transcode engine
o H.264 up to L4.2@HP, MPEG-2 up to HL@MP
o Transcoding - MPEG2 <--> H.264
o Transrating - HD bitrates or lower
o Transcaling - HD resolutions or lower
Multi-format audio encoder and transcoder
Transcryption of CA/DRM
Multiple system interfaces

While the company has not publicly released its pricing on the ZN200, we believe it is in the $14 to $16 ASP (average selling price) range for larger quantities.

In addition to the ZN200, the company offers a lower-priced two HD channel transcoder (ZN180) and a dedicated dual stream co-processor (ZN180).

Zenverge also offers the ZN2000, the professional infrastructure application version of the ZN200 for cloud infrastructure which not only handles 4 HD channels simultaneously but gives designer ability to put multiple chips on a PCIE board. For example, a rack solution using this approach could process hundreds of channels of HD content. Such a system product could process many channels of HD and transcode them for live streaming applications, and the next generation of video streaming where operators gain the ability to perform a dedicated transcoding session in the cloud.

In its longer term vision, Zenverge believes that like VoiP with 256 voice channels, services like Netlix and Hulu will move to keep their content in its highest quality format and use dedicated transcoder ports to connect to user sessions to transcode the video to conditions that the user prefers. Today, Netflix stores hundreds of variations of the same file in its hard disk drives at their data center. When a user connects to the content, its servers basically switch to different versions of that content depending on the user device capability and network conditions.

The market for these advanced chips used in video datacenters could be in hundreds of thousands. The early adopters of the model are hospitality and hotel oriented applications and multi-tenant dwellings.

The competition comes from several bigger players and a handful of startups. Most significantly, Broadcom will be an increasingly bigger threat since the chip giant has the financial muscle to acquire companies to better compete in markets it goes after. Up to now Broadcom's products have utilized a brute force approach for transcoding.   Often, Zenverge chips sit next to Broacom and Intel SoCs which perform network processing and display functions.

Zenverge's most direct competitor is ViXS of Toronto, Canada. ViXS was founded five years before Zenverge and claims to have amassed a technology arsenal of 400+ patents awarded or pending. The Canadian venture-backed firm enjoys an early start and stated that it has made more than 30 million unit shipments to date. InsideChips believes that the company reached about $35 million in sales in the past 12 months, but has suffered substantial losses during that period.

Nevertheless, ViXS represents a market threat to Zenverge since it has garnered market traction and recently it has successfully completed a private placement and merged with W7 Acquisition Corp. closing $57 million in new funds. The move will make ViXS a public company.

Larger competitors are struggling with current standards using outdated technologies. Other competitors do pieces of the product functions that Zenverge focuses on. Magnum Semiconductor, for example, which has codec technology, is mainly serving the professional head end equipment space and is not a direct competitor.

Zenverge operates with a staff totaling 100 employees with headquarters based in Santa Clara, Calif. and a design center operation in Bangalore, India. About 30% of the workforce is located in India. The India operation has grown organically as several of the staff wished to return to India. The operation increased in size substantially in the past few years and will be a key adjunct to the Silicon Valley development efforts -- especially the software-related algorithmic R&D.

In addition to founders Mobini and Masterson, Zenverge's management lineup includes:

Raghu Rao, executive VP of world wide sales (ex-Marvell Semiconductor, GlobeSpanVirata/Conexant Systems, TeraLogic/Zoran, LSI Logic, DEC)
Shawn Saleem, executive VP of marketing and strategy planning (ex-Cignias, ViXS Systems, ATI)
Toshio Matsumoto, VP of business development (ex-Conexant, iCompression, Arithmos)
Kent Goodwin, executive VP of engineering (ex-Silicon Optix, Parama Networks, Mediamatics/National Semiconductor, Weitek)
Robert Bagheri, executive VP of operations (ex-AMCC, Silicon Image, SiRF, S3, Zoran)
Deb Chartterjee, VP of algorithms and India operations (ex-Xambala, PortalPlayer, iCompression)
Craig Garber, CFO (ex-Element Labs, SiTime, Applied Materials, Lam Research)

The company's marketing strategy focuses on the operator space to enable them to move content around the home on multiple devices and lower their costs at the same time. The market is evolving with an increasing number of devices around the home, including tablets, smartphones, game consoles, and smart TVs that can use content from the operator but lack compatibility. Zenverge sits at the entry gateway and massages the content to adapt it to the end devices and send it around the house. Consumers have more display devices, more ways to consume to display the content. The other market driver is performance in general for these content networking ICs. The operators are slowly moving away from broadcasts in 1080i format. Next year, operators will roll out 1080p content with twice the complexity. As that bar doubles next year, Zenverge believes it will have offerings which will meet the requirements.

Zenverge is well funded and operates with a diversified management team with a core team coming from Conexant via the iCompression merger who are familiar with each others management style. The company's decision early on to go back to the drawing board to create an architecture which is scalable and memory bandwidth efficient should continue to pay off in the future as processing demands increase. The company's ability to maintain its cost competitiveness by having the lowest silicon footprint per channel of HD will be a key factor. One of the key selling points to prospective customers is that its solution requires less than half the external memory needed by its competitors to process eight channels of HD.

Scalability of the technology is a big issue which will allow Zenverge to introduce SoCs with very competitive die sizes as it moves to the next generation process geometries. Also, the company's four HD stream offering is adequate, future options might include a six stream chip which would be with widely used 6-stream cable cards.

Zenverge's bigger rivals are essentially duplicating pipelines to address each channel of HD which creates die area inefficiencies and redundancies. Competitors are also using separate memory busses for each of the pipelines demanding larger memory resources.

Zenverge is creating architectures which are more efficient in die area footprint and memory usage -- giving it what it believes is a sustainable advantage. Zenverge boasts of 38 relevant patents received or pending to back up its claim.

With the cost performance metrics that Zenverge claims, the company will come under the scrutiny of bigger worldwide chip suppliers as the market expands dramatically in the next three years. With the number of innovative startups limited in the home networking transcoding space, Zenverge is a likely candidate for future acquisition.

Contact:
Zenverge, Inc.
3960 Freedom Circle, Suite 100,
Santa Clara, CA 95054
Tel: 408 350 5052
Fax: 408 673 2272

India Design Center:
No.135, 1st Floor, Infantry Road
Bangalore 56001 India
Tel: +91 80 22863283

Redpine Signals

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 23:31:26 GMT

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.

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:

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)

Wi-Fi was designed as a complex networking technology designed to run on a processor platform. Redpine Signals' value proposition is bringing a WiFi solution to resource constrained markets, such as those seen by embedded engineers who work outside the realm of high-volume consumer applications.

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.

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

Fresco Microchip

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:54:42 GMT

Founded in 2004, Fresco Microchip was created to address the changes that are occurring in the digital television market. The world's broadcast industry is rapidly evolving from analog to digital broadcasting and this initiates the need for universal reception and signal conversion for legacy analog, digital terrestrial and cable transmissions. The fabless semiconductor company is focused on leading edge RF, mixed-signal, and DSP architectures for consumer markets.

Fresco obtained a commitment of $14.7 million in July 2005 from a group of VCs led by Celtic House and Ventures West.

Lance Greggain

In June 2007, the company unveiled its first chip, the FM2080, a single-chip demodulator for universal analog (NTSC, PAL, SECAM) and DVB-T digital television broadcasts. The device is designed to enhance the consumer television viewing experience across a broad spectrum of platforms designed by the world's leading consumer electronics manufacturers. Typical TV receivers require a tuner, extensive intermediate frequency (IF) processing, digital and legacy video demodulator chips. IF processing is typically accomplished with multiple SAW filters, active amplifiers and dozens of passive components. The FM2080 eliminates complexity by bringing together universal legacy video (NTSC, PAL, SECAM) and audio demodulation, digital video demodulation, and IF processing into a single IC. The chip supports all modes of the DVB-T standard and is designed to meet NorDig Unified 1.02, Digital Television Group D-Book (DTG) and the E-Book requirements for digital television platforms. Legacy demodulation is compliant with free-to-air international broadcast standards commonly used in DVB-T countries. Fresco's first microchip is being dubbed as the world's first single-chip hybrid receiver for DVB-T markets.

Lance Greggain, a co-founder, serves as president and CEO. He is a veteran of five fabless semiconductor start ups prior to Fresco Microchip. In 1999 Greggain was the solo founder of Jaldi Semiconductor, a Toronto area fabless semiconductor company, focused on display controllers and color decoders for advanced televisions. He served as CEO of Jaldi through the collapse of the high tech bubble and guided the company to its acquisition by Pixelworks in September 2002. Prior to Jaldi, he held several positions with Genesis Microchip, a Toronto area fabless semiconductor company, including CTO and VP of product development from the company's inception until its IPO in 1998. Prior to Genesis, Greggain worked in design and development of design automation tools, standard product DRAM and SRAM, radio pager and audio bipolar integrated circuits, pattern recognition systems, optical hardware, television systems, and quality assurance. His employers have included National Semiconductor, Spectrum Semiconductor, Mosaid, Siltronics Research, Sperry Univac and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Michael Gittings is the company's VP of marketing and business development. He will have overall responsibility for the company's global marketing strategy, product management, communications, and applications support. Gittings most recently served as director of marketing for AMD's global DTV receiver products. He established ATI (acquired by AMD) as the world's leading supplier of North American integrated HDTV receiver ICs. As a founder of NxtWave Communications, he was the marketing and applications executive responsible for fostering partnerships that led to a successful acquisition by ATI. Prior to NxtWave, he held senior engineering positions at General Instrument (acquired by Motorola), General Electric, Martin Marietta, and RCA.

Scott Baker is a co-founder and serves as VP of engineering and operations. Formerly, he was a VP of engineering at Silicon Optix. From 1992, Baker held various positions at Genesis Microchip until 2002 when he was director, product development. He began his career in 1985 developing ASICs, hardware and software for Litton Systems Canada Ltd., Pure Data Research Ltd., Northern Technologies Ltd. and Navtel Communications.

Others in management team include:

Steve Selby, co-founder, CTO (ex-Genesis, ATI)
Chris Ouslis, co-founder, VP IC technology (ex-Synopsys, InSilicon, Xentec)
John Tryhub, VP, product marketing (ex-Genesis, Gennum)
Mike Neshat, VP, worldwide sales (ex-WyLinx, Synad Technologies, NxWave)
Bob Forbes, director, Ottawa Design Center (ex-Pixelworks, Jaldi)

The company is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with design centers in Ottawa, Canada, and Irvine, California.

Contact:
Fresco Microchip
19 Allstate Parkway, Suite 500
Markham, Ontario
Canada L3R 5A4
Tel: 905 480 9109
Fax: 905 480 9484

Irvine, California (USA) Design Centre
6 Jenner Street, Suite 290
Irvine, CA 92618