Icera Semiconductor is a "big, hairy, audacious plan", according to one of its venture capital backers, Martin Gibson of Atlas Ventures, which has helped make Icera Europe's best-funded fabless semiconductor start-up company amassing $142.5m in VC funding.
Gibson told the International System and SoC Conference in Prague: "For many companies the VC-backed start-up model is broken. I don't want to focus on large, fixed function chips for medium-sized niches," said Gibson.
"What works is big audacious plays," said Stan Boland, CEO of Icera. "If a company's market is big enough, and its technology differentiated enough to drive you to market leadership, then you make a spectacular return for investors."
Icera is still chasing its first handset design-in. "It always takes longer than you expect in cellular," said Boland.
However, with handset designers now prepared to buy chips from the fabless community, with handset designers finding their chip suppliers stumbling over delivery dates, with an extensive programme of certification completed, with 65nm chips imminent, and with the smallest baseband processor die in the market, Icera is well-placed to crack the handset market.
Before that, it hopes to have cracked the laptop computer market with a cellular datacomms chip.