Silicon 60 Class of 2018 (Including C3Nano!)
Here’s our updated list of 60 startups worth watching
(Asterisks denote the companies that are new to the Silicon 60.)
AccelerComm Ltd.* (Southampton, U.K.) is a semiconductor IP core company that provides channel-coding solutions for communications standards. Founded in 2016, it is coming to market with polar encoder and decoder solutions for 3GPP’s 5G standards. www.accelercomm.com
AerNos Inc.* (La Jolla, California), founded in 2016, uses doped materials and nanotechnology to detect multiple airborne gases and volatile organic compounds simultaneously at part-per-billion levels. Its sensors include carbon nanotubes, nanowires, and polymers. www.aernos.com
Aledia SA (Grenoble, France), spun out of CEA-Leti in 2011, has developed a method of forming light-emitting diodes (LEDs) within vertical pillars of gallium nitride grown on silicon wafers. The company claims that the technique produces three times more light per planar area than conventional approaches while using less GaN material. www.aledia.com
AlphaICs Corp.* (Milpitas, California) was founded in 2016 to address artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tasks with a processor architecture designed to support “agents.” The company also has an office in Bangalore, India. www.alphaics.ai
AnDapt Inc. (San Jose, California), a fabless vendor founded in 2014, has launched configurable ICs that combine power MOSFET, analog, and digital circuitry and can be used to create power circuits. Its team includes veteran semiconductor executives Kapil Shankar and John Birkner. Intel Capital and Cisco are backers. www.andapt.com
Barefoot Networks Inc. (Santa Clara, California), a microprocessor startup founded in 2013, has attracted US$130 million in funding from strategic backers that include Google, Goldman Sachs, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Its Tofino chips aim to make programming complex networks as easy as writing C++ code in an emerging open-source language, called P4, that the company helped create. www.barefootnetworks.com
BrainChip Inc. (Aliso Viejo, California) is developing spiking neural networking cores for licensing to semiconductor partners. Founded in December 2013, it is now owned by BrainChip Holdings Ltd., which is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. The company appointed Louis DiNardo as CEO in September 2016. www.brainchipinc.com
Cambricon Technologies Corp. Ltd. (Beijing), founded in 2016, is developing AI chips. It offers the MLU100 processor for deep learning and the MLU100 intelligent processing card, as well as intellectual-property (IP) licensing and chip services. Cambricon’s products can be applied in smartphones, security and surveillance cameras, servers, robots, drones, wearable devices, and autonomous driving. www.cambricon.com
Cerebras Systems Inc. (Los Altos, California), a startup working on specialized chips for deep-learning applications, claims to have backing from premier venture capitalists and leading technologists. It was founded in 2016 and is headed by Andrew Feldman, who sold micro-server chip company SeaMicro to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in 2012 for US$334 million. Benchmark is reported to have led a funding round totaling more than US$20 million. www.cerebras.net
Corephotonics Ltd. (Tel Aviv, Israel), a pioneer of multi-aperture cameras for smartphones, offers zoom capabilities while keeping the tele-objective mechanics within the phones’ low-profile constraints. It was founded in 2012 by Tel Aviv University professor David Mendlovic, a former chief scientist of the Ministry of Science and now Corephotonics’ CEO. In 2017, the company raised US$15 million in a round that included Samsung Ventures, Foxconn, and MediaTek. It is collaborating with camera module integrator Samsung Electro-Mechanics to develop a complete reference design based on its dual-camera IP. www.corephotonics.com
Crossbar Inc. (Santa Clara), formed in 2010, has developed a resistive random access memory (ReRAM) based on the migration of silver ions through amorphous silicon to form a filamentary structure. The company is aiming to produce a multilayered standalone terabyte memory die and integrate the technology in standard CMOS logic to provide embedded nonvolatile memory. It offers predefined and custom IP cores with specific features, sizes, and performance. www.crossbar-inc.com
C3Nano Inc.* (Hayward, California), founded in 2010 as a spinout from Zhenan Bao’s chemical engineering lab at Stanford University, has developed solution-coated, transparent, conductive materials that compete with indium tin oxide and can be superior to ITO for flexible applications. NanoGlue technology is used to fuse a matrix of conductive silver nanowires into a conductive network or grid and can lower sheet resistance while maintaining optical transparency and low haze. www.c3nano.com
Read more at EETimes HERE.