Indian semiconductor start-up gets $18m funding

Sufia Tippu
Thursday, 06 July 2006 20:37

IT Industry - Market

InSilica, a US-India semiconductor start-up, has obtained second round funding of $18 million to expand its business worldwide and broaden its customer base.

An innovative fabless supplier of high-value and high-volume ASIC and standard system-on-chip solutions, InSilica was founded on an Indo-US model where executive and engineering leadership is driven in Silicon Valley by industry veterans like Vinod Dham (who was on the initial Intel Pentium team)  and a highly skilled and scalable India development team based in India.  

Intel Capital, Flextronics, Crossbow Ventures, Dow Ventures and NewPath Ventures participated in this second round. 

After initial financing of $10 milllion about two years ago, the company spent most of  its time in 2004 developing and proving a proprietary design flow and intellectual property base which enable solutions that are lower power, higher performance, faster time to market, and more competitively priced than typical standard ASIC suppliers were capable of delivering.  

In 2005 InSilica focused on a select set of target customers in key segments such as mobile phones, high performance networking, high definition video processing, broadband wireless communications who would find critical value in these differentiators
As a result the company ramped up its production in early 2006.   This customer base includes both traditional systems OEMs as well as other fabless semiconductor suppliers who chose InSilica for their execution and delivery as a more effective approach over vertical integration. 

“In today’s dynamic, fast-paced competitive market, a clear need exists for low power, high-performance customized system on chip (SoC) solutions.  InSilica’s products provide customers with cost-effective, flexible, high volume solutions to satisfy these exact requirements,”   Kumar Shiralagi, Director, Intel Capital India, said.

InSilica will be using the funding to build out its IP portfolio further, as well as adding scale to its sales and marketing team. The company intends to maintain a strategic focus on customers so that it builds a recurring longer term business relationships than those in the typical customized SOC and ASIC segments.

“InSilica has proven it’s ability to win and deliver on designs that are pushing the specification limits of what the multitude of typical standard ASIC companies can provide. We are doing this more cost effectively and with faster time to market” said Balaji Baktha, President and CEO of InSilica Corp.