Marseille Networks, a startup that makes it easier to design chip prototypes, said today it has raised $4.5 million in a second round of funding.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company is relatively rare as a chip company that successfully raised venture capital money. Chip startups are rare these days because it usually takes a lot of money to create a new chip and bring it to market. But Marseille is offering a way to bring down chip costs significantly.
Marseille is making its own line of consumer electronics chips. But it has also created the Virtual Silicon platform, which can be used by other chip companies or system companies to design their own chips. The platform lets engineers design chips in software and test features in real-time prior to fabricating the first chip. That allows for early collaboration with customers.
The company will use the money to kick off production of its own first line of consumer electronics chips -- the VTV-1200 series of video up-converter chips, which make video images sharper.
The company has moved from development to production of its 65-nanometer chips with less than $12 million in overall investment. The Virtual Silicon platform uses a hybrid of hardware emulation (where one machine pretends to act like another) and software simulation, where a software program simulates the final product. By doing this kind of prototyping rapidly, big companies can work the kinks out of their designs early and get their products to market on time and at lower costs.
The Virtual Silicon platform also allows Marseille to build chips that have been tested and approved by consumer electronics manufacturers. That reduces the overall risks of manufacturing. Amine Chabane, chief executive of Marseille Networks, said the company reduces the risk and cost associated with making new chips.
Marseille was founded in 2005 and has 30 employees. Rivals include Marvell, Silicon Image, and Realtek. But Marseille says the Virtual Silicon technology helps its stand out from rivals. Investors include KMP and Kumpulan Modal Perdana Sdn Bhd.