Mannerisms

There was a nice comment at the recent meeting run by SETsquared, the inter-university start-up support programme, when James Collier, CTO and co-founder of Cambridge Silicon Radio said he had come to talk about his experiences because he believed in SETsquared.

How do you find a good venture capitalist? Now we have a simple guide from a top member of the VC community.

Parallel processing will be one of the key technologies under development this year with UK companies Clearspeed, Picochip and XMOS expected to play a leading part.

Research from the University of Californa at Berkeley and from Duke Universitysuggests that immigrants are not only filing a quarter of all the patents filed in the US, they are founders of 25 per cent of the enigineering start-up companies.

They take a long time to change their minds in Scotland. I don’t know for how many hundreds of years the MacDonalds have hated the Campbells, but it’s a fair few, and little sign of it changing.

A nice trend is that the VC community in the UK is getting a bit disenchanted with the software business.

The Greeks are following the example of many nations in trying to establish a 'cluster' of IC companies with links to academia aspiring to be the genesis of a significant national microelectronics industry.

I see that the new (but under construction) web-site of XMOS Semiconductor, the start-up founded by the Professor of Computer Science at Bristol University, David May FRS, who invented the Inmos Transputer, is displaying a description of its products: "The low-cost, low-power alternative to FPGAs".

People have been worrying for ages that the game isn’t worth the candle in backing semiconductor companies.

It’s something of a surprise to see a distinguished academic wanting to return people to the days when design was done in garages. Mind you, garages spawned HP and Apple. But somehow one assumed those days were gone.

Venture capital-backed start-up semiconductor companies are a rarity in Japan, but that could be about to change as THine, the Tokyo fabless mixed signal semiconductor specialist, is now hoping to extend the model by kick-starting a VC fund for high-tech start-ups.

If you put together under-utilised engineers, a shrinking semiconductor sector and pro-active venture capitalists, you get start-up companies, and this seems to be the brew which is being stirred in Japan.

Icera Semiconductor seems to walk on water. The four year-old company always seems to have investors willing to come up with more cash, and it always seems to have ambitious spending plans.

Upek, the three year-old STMicroelectronics spin-off specialising in fingerprint sensors, is preparing to IPO after substantial revenue growth.

The money men always seem to want a new dream to tilt at and, with the evaporation of the private equity mirage, the next new dream is tech.

A particularly interesting transition from the IP to the fabless model is the two year-old Edinburgh start-up Spiral Gateway, which has a C-programmable technology for image processors.

Here in San Francisco it’s a bit depressing to hear people say that the old magic mix of Silicon Valley, the mix of money, technology and entrepreneurs, is losing its potency.

The UK semiconductor industry has never been in better shape. With start-ups like Icera, picoChip and XMOS it is better placed to grow major new companies based on UK technology than it has ever been.

Innovation has to return to the semiconductor industry at the transistor level rather than the exploitation of the massive transistor counts made possible by modern scaling, according to Andy Rappaport General Partner at August Capital.

Rappaport, who has invested in Actel, Atheros Genoa, MMC Networks, Silicon Architects (acquired by Synopsys) Silicon Image, Viewlogic and Transmeta has not invested in any start-up that proposed using 90nm or 65nm processes.

"The share of companies that will choose to develop very large chips will have to fall, if bulk transistor utilisation is expensive relative to value, marginal transistor improvement can be hugely valuable relative to cost," says Rappaport, who founded The Technology Research Group (TRG), and used to be an editor at EDN, a sister magazine to Electronics Weekly.

To put it another way, Rappaport says: "Lack of easy scaling makes clever scaling really important."