Startups' Chips Invigorate Austin's Silicon Hills

AUSTIN, Texas — Several startups here, survivors of the downturn's withering winds, are sampling early silicon, much of it for mixed-signal applications.

Alereon, Bandspeed, NetEffect and PropheSi Technologies are showing their various wares to customers. Another promising Austin startup, NanoCoolers, says it is nearly ready to offer evaluation samples of its processor-cooling modules, based on a liquid form of gallium and indium.

The five companies enter the market at a critical juncture. Despite major successes like SigmaTel and Silicon Laboratories, venture capital firms here are looking cautiously at chip startups and their long and expensive design cycles. A larger portion of Austin's pool of VC investments has been going into either system companies or software startups, including two stealth-mode EDA companies, Pyxis and Nascentric.

Alereon Inc. is riding the ultrawideband (UWB) wave and expects its early customers to demo systems at January's Consumer Electronics Show. The company supports multiband orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM).

Speaking at the recent Silicon Hills Summit here, CEO Eric Brookman said Alereon is the first member of the Multiband OFDM Alliance's Special Interest Group to offer both the RF transceiver chip, which Alereon crafted in a silicon germanium process from Jazz Semiconductor, as well as a baseband device, based on a 0.13-micron silicon process. The baseband chip supports a 480-Mbit/second transfer speed, he said, asserting that UWB test silicon from other companies is limited to about 100 Mbits/s. The Multiband-OFDM approach competes with a direct-sequence UWB method backed primarily by Freescale Semiconductor Inc.Brookman, who earlier ran Cirrus Logic Corp.'s Crystal Semiconductor division, said that while most startups today go to contract engineering companies for placement and routing, Alereon "took a chance on Magma."

Alereon engineers collaborated with Magma Design Automation Inc.'s engineering-support team, and both chips taped out within days of each other in early July. Alereon engineers are now optimizing the designs, reducing the die sizes and working to cut power consumption. The company expects to begin sampling its chip set in the second quarter, with initial revenues in the first half of 2005.

"The physical-design tools are so expensive, most startup companies go to contractors and pay them to do the back end," Brookman said. "We took a chance on Magma and worked with them on a contract to buy our own tools so we could wire the chip faster than if we had gone the design services route. We did not save money that way — it takes a lot of money, even with a multiyear contract. But the benefit is that the design was flawless and we did save some time."

That decision also helped Alereon move straight from an FPGA implementation to a structured ASIC, he said.

"Early customers want to know, how well does UWB work?" Brookman said. "And there are different needs. One customer might need UWB for connectivity between a digital camera and a printer, while another needs it to connect video equipment that is 35 feet away."Alereon received its baseband silicon on Oct. 11. At the start of the same month, Bandspeed Inc. got its first prototype silicon back from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s silicon shuttle.

"Our first shuttle run worked fine," said Bandspeed CEO Bill Eversole, who earlier ran the digital subscriber line operation at Texas Instruments Inc. "We used Synopsys tools for the front end and worked with another company, which did a great job, on a contract basis for the physical back end." Eversole would not name the second vendor.

Bandspeed's silicon and software are being designed into a new generation of 802.11 wireless-LAN access points. The software, called Listen and Learn, is geared to help IT managers avoid problems associated with overlapping or competing wireless networks, and improves data throughput. "We are doing all the performance testing now, and adding support for the alphabet soup, the a, b, g and other forms of 802.11," Eversole said. Bandspeed's engineers are pulling late-night shifts, he said, to hand off the sample silicon to access point designers in the next few weeks.

NetEffect Inc. is the name taken by the reincarnation of Banderacom, which had targeted Infiniband silicon. With their successful design of 10-Gbit/s Infiniband silicon, NetEffect engineers had a head start on the emerging iWarp standard aimed at enhanced 10-Gbit Ethernet channel adapters. The device talks to the server chip set, reducing Ethernet latencies to about 9 microseconds at the full 10-GHz speed.

Rick Maule, who came to NetEffect a year ago after working at 3Com Inc., said the silicon is in FPGA form now."We'll continue to verify our design in FPGAs through the end of this year, and then move to a structured ASIC in the first quarter," Maule said.

NetEffect's road map calls for a cost-optimized, cell-based version of the silicon, possibly as soon as late 2005. That's when volumes in the iWarp market are expected to take off.

For its part, PropheSi Technologies Inc. is fielding a two-chip modulator/amplifier package aimed at cellular basestations, said CEO Graham Haddock, a veteran of Motorola Inc.'s wireless-infrastructure semiconductor operation. By using 2-GHz digital circuits to attack the power amplifier portion, PropheSi expects to raise power efficiencies from the 10 percent or so that is possible with analog amplifiers to the 40 percent to 50 percent range, Haddock said.

Reducing heat can shrink the amplifier module to a third of its present size, the company maintains. That's small enough to fit into a blade-type board design.

"We expect to have a technical demonstration ready by January, and then go for our B round of funding," Haddock said.The multichip module includes a custom silicon-germanium-based modulator chip fabbed at Jazz. "We had a choice of four foundries, but we picked Jazz because they seemed to have the best tools and support staff," Haddock said. "For the GaAs power amplifier, we used Triquint's fab in the Portland [Oregon] area."

Both are first-pass iterations based on shuttle runs, said co-founder Peter Allen, who serves as the vice president of marketing and business development at PropheSi. "The second-pass devices will add functionality, but we wanted to get the first-pass devices out there so customers can see that this is really disruptive technology."

PropheSi expects to have production-ready devices qualified by the fourth quarter of 2005, in part for 3G basestations.

At some point, PropheSi will move from gallium arsenide to gallium nitride (GaN) as the process for its amplifier chip.

"With GaN we believe we can double the voltage, and since the amplifier power is roughly a square of the voltage, that means a lot," Allen said. "GaAs runs at 20 volts. With GaN, we hope we can get to 48 V."Gallium nitride is an evolving field with various materials challenges. "GaN will come when it comes, when it is mature," Allen said. "But the voltages possible are leading us in that direction."

NanoCoolers Inc. has developed cooling technology targeted initially at servers, where power densities can exceed 100 watts/cm2, and at notebook PCs, to cool both the central processor and the graphics processor.

Besides fans, the computer industry has relied on heat pipes, which cycle water, for cooling. But heat pipes tend to dry out over time, said CEO Jim Moore. NanoCoolers uses a nonflammable form of "liquid metal," a mixture of gallium and indium that Moore called 65 times more efficient than water. Further, the NanoCoolers pump design consumes only 300 to 400 milliwatts, using Lorentz electromagnetic forces to move the liquid. "The properties of the liquid permit a lower-power pump," said Moore.

Moore said NanoCoolers is doing joint-development work with two large computer vendors now, and expects to complete product qualification in February, moving quickly into production the following month.