Bristol and its environs have become synonymous as an area for leading edge CMOS chip design.

The area has a history in innovative microprocessor design stretching back to the 1970s when the Transputer was designed in Bristol by David May at Inmos.

But it was in the 1990s that the seeds of Inmos started to bear fruit with the formation of local design teams by companies such as STMicroelectronics, which acquired Inmos, Hewlett-Packard and Broadcom.

This established community of chip design also helped to drive a mini revolution in fabless start-ups, which includes Icera, ClearSpeed, PicoChip, Air Semiconductor, Nanotech Semiconductor and XMOS Semiconductor, where David May is CTO.         

Tip of the iceberg 

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. According to Greville Commins, head of a government-funded project in the South West region which is looking for fabless chip start-ups to support: "There are over 75 technology companies in the South West."

A group of chip companies have ambitious plans. XMOS Semiconductor is already making the FPGA suppliers sit up and take notice with its plans to offer a "new-type" of programmable chip with a price model which will allow it to be used in high volume consumer products.

XMOS has been working on product development for two years with venture capital backing from Amadeus Capital Partners and Esprit Capital Partners. It has a team of 23 people in Bristol.
Over in Bath, multi-core processor firm PicoChip is also expanding its development activities following a recent funding round which netted $27m.

Investment has been flowing in to the region's fabless start-ups. PicoChip now has seen a total investment of over $70m, while another West Country wireless chip start-up, Icera, has had over $100m invested.

Mobile phone market

But this is not just a home to processor design. Air Semiconductor, the Swindon-based wireless start-up, started a recruitment drive earlier in the summer to support the development of products for the mobile phone market.

"We're looking for digital IC designers, lay-out guys, software designers and programme management people," Air's co-founder and v-p of marketing, Stephen Graham, told Electronics Weekly.

Bristol-based Nanotech Semiconductor has identified a way to design low power optical transceivers which can be fabbed on a CMOS logic process. This makes them cost-effective and also attractive to a company like Infineon Technologies which has a development partnership with Nanotech.

The company has 30 design engineers based in Bracknell and Bristol. "We believe we now have the largest - and best - development team in the world dedicated to analogue CMOS ICs for fibre based communications," says company CEO Gary Steele.