VentureBeat

Tilera has raised $10 million in funding from Taiwanese contract manufacturer Quanta Computer in a round that will ultimately total $25 million.

Quanta is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of laptops. San Jose, Calif.-based Tilera makes chips that can be used to make networking equipment more powerful and efficient. The deal is among a number of investments that Quanta plans to make in cloud-computing technology.

Last September, Tilera launched two models of its new TilePro family of chips for telecom and networking infrastructure where energy-efficient performance is paramount. With dozens of processors on a single chip, TilePro is based on the custom Tile architecture that Tilera debuted in 2007.

Tilera’s goal is to establish an alternative processor platform for communications customers. If it succeeds, it will prove that the day of launching new chip architectures isn’t dead, suggesting that there is still room for innovative chip design in a decades-old industry as new computing problems and applications surface.

Tilera is targeting the chips at high-end networking equipment that would otherwise use digital signal processing chips from Texas Instruments.

Anant Agarwal founded the company in 2004 based on his new idea for interconnecting different cores on a single chip. The first chip debuted in 2007 and the new ones have smarter memory. Tilera previously raised $39 million in two rounds of funding. Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Venture Tech Alliance (TSMC’s venture arm), and Walden Capital Partners.

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