Chip start-ups have always viewed the communications/networking market as prime territory to launch a new semiconductor chip. Cswitch in Santa Clara, Calif., is coming at the market with a different approach. And it is raising a new round of cash to do so.
Doug Laird, CEO of Cswitch, said in an interview that his company is seeking its third round of funding to complete production of its chips, which have been under design since 2004. The company has finished the design and has produced engineering samples. To date, the company has raised more than $41 million in two rounds.
Here’s its unique approach to the market. Like eASIC, which recently received $48 million in funding (our coverage), Cswitch seeks to exploit the gap between two major markets: the $20 billion custom chip (application specific integrated circuit, or ASIC) market and the $3.7 billion FPGA market (field programmable gate arrays). More on the gap in a sec.
Internet, particularly video on the web, is creating the demand for Internet infrastructure — the same demand helping eAsic. That, in turn, creates demand for communications chips that can process data at ever higher rates. But Laird says: “There is a growing gap between FPGAs and ASICs.”
The ASIC chips (like those being designed by Aquantia, our coverage) are cheap to produce but come with high upfront design costs. They are used for volume production of cihps. FPGAs are expensive but they can be programmed at the last minute. Thus, they are useful as prototype chips and can be used to get a product to market quickly, albeit expensively.
Laird says his company is designing chips with high-speed switches that are customized for the communications and networking markets. But they’re also programmable, just like FPGAs. Hence, Laird says the chips combine the best of both worlds for customers in the communications market. eASIC, by contrast, focuses more broadly on all sorts of markets. Read the rest of this entry »
