Trying not to blow a story about Icera that my colleague David Manners has written in this week’s issue of Electronics Weekly, but the firm is up to $140m of funding now.
That is the most funding of any UK fabless semiconductor company. In comparison ARM had just $1.75m. What will come of this? It appears it is the software that is increasingly costing more in developing a chip but where do the financials come good in this situation?
I suggested at Cadence’s recent start-up roundtable that it was simply costing too much to develop a fabless firm now. The response from the VCs was that my suggestion can’t be true because these firms are getting funded. But will Icera be the last at this sort of level of finance? It has already been suggested that this kind of start-up will migrate to low cost labour areas where a similar firm to Icera could be set up and run with a lot less cash.
Icera got its money because of the people who run it, successful technology start-up veterans such as Stan Boland who was at the massively successful Element 14. The VCs want to see the same again of course. Element 14 was sold to Broadcom for $640m just before the dotcom crash in 2000 and he was at Acorn, sold to Morgan Stanley for $440m.
If Icera come out of all this funding with a return for the VCs, it is going to be a massive sigh of relief but if they don’t it could impact fables chip funding in the UK for a long time to come.