VentureBeat

The hardest thing about starting a chip company these days is the cost. A big team of engineers has to work for 18 months or more to create a custom chip. Then it takes $1 million for the templates, or masks, that the factory needs to stamp out the chips. It takes 16 weeks for the chips to run through the factory.

The cost can hit $65 million before all is said and done. eASIC, a start-up in Santa Clara, Calif., is working hard on attacking these problems so that chip start-ups — which are kind of a dying breed in the inappropriately named Silicon Valley these days — can flourish again. The company has figured out how to reset the cost equation so that even complex chips can be affordable to design and don’t take as long to make, said Ronnie Vasishta, chief executive of eASIC.

Since the ante for chips is so big, the number of custom chips that are being designed has declined for the past decade. But since eASIC debuted its start-up friendly design process in 2006, the company has won more than 120 customer designs. Today, it is launching a second generation of its design process, Nextreme 2, that may make its customers even more competitive with the biggest chip makers.

eASIC said it will let customers design 45-nanometer chips (the number refers to the microscopic width between circuits), with the first chips coming out sometime this fall. Previously, only the biggest of chip makers, such as Intel, had access to the 45-nanometer technology. eASIC will be using a contract chip manufacturer, Chartered Semiconductor, to make its 45-nm chips.

eASIC combines two traditional chips: the application specific integrated circuit (ASIC, a $20 billion market) and the field-programmable gate array (FPGA, a $3.7 billion market). As such, its competitors are big companies that range from Toshiba to Xilinx. Some companies such as Altera , On Semiconductor’s AMI Semiconductor division, and a partnership of IBM and Xilinx have tried to create hybrid models of ASICs and FPGAs. And companies such as Tensilica and eSilicon are also trying to cut the high cost and time it takes to design ASICs. But there are built-in trade-offs to the designs.  Vasishta says that eASIC’s recipe maximizes customization without requiring extensive chip rewiring.

ASIC chips are fast and low cost, but they are expensive to design and take years to finish. FPGAs are generic chips that can be programmed quickly at the last minute to fit a rapid product cycle. But they cost a lot and are slow.

eASIC can fuse these chips by creating generic chips that are inexpensive to make. But it allows for full customization by allowing the customers to add the final layer of metal on top of a nearly-finished generic chip. This kind of customization cuts factory turnaround times and costs because it doesn’t take much time (just six weeks) or special design work to add that last metal layer. The upfront design costs can be as low as $20,000 to $100,000, much lower than the cost of designing an ASIC.

The chips therefore have the hybrid benefits of the full customization of ASICs and the short turnaround times and flexibility of FPGAs. The promise of eASIC is that it can make it a lot easier for start-ups to get to market faster. That is why it has been able to raise $80 million to date from Khosla Ventures; Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers; Crescendo Ventures, Evergreen Venture Partners and Advanced Equities. Most recently, the company raised a $48 million round in March.

Getting to 45nm is a big accomplishment, since only 14 other chip makers have made such announcements. Vasishta said that the company started with 90nm technology and decided to skip the 65nm generation. For the past two years, it worked on delivering a 45nm technology that would leapfrog many competitors and put the company in lock step with giants such as Intel in the technology race.

Customers are making chips for a wide range of applications, including security cameras, cameras, smart phones, and a variety of consumer electronics and computing gear. While ASICs often require huge orders to offset the engineering costs, eASIC doesn’t require minimum orders. Roughly 30 percent of the company’s customers are billion-dollar chip makers, while 40 percent are start-ups.

Customers are expected to use eASIC’s tools so that they can begin fabricating the first 45nm designs later on this year. The first product will be a new graphics chip, Vasishta said. Full told, eASIC customers should be able to get into the make with $150,000.

With any luck, Avvo is going to make finding lawyers and getting legal advice a lot less intimidating.

That’s because the company, which formally launched its site today after more than a year of beta testing, applies Web 2.0 techniques that keep the lawyers honest and give consumers more options.

We already know it works — not least because of the controversy it has stirred. When Avvo first launched, negative ratings poured in on certain lawyers, and some fought back. One, John Browne, sued Avvo after a profile of him noted that he’d been disciplined by state authorities. But that only increased traffic, bringing more people — and thus more opinions — to the site.

Avvo is the brainchild of Mark Britton, who named it Avvo for the Italian word Avvocato, or lawyer. (He was teaching in Florence, Italy, when he cooked up the idea). Even while away in Italy, he still had to field queries from friends and family on how to find a lawyer.

Today, the Seattle-based company runs a site with three valuable services for consumers. It has a directory of lawyers in 18 of the most populous states. Each lawyer can be rated by their clients or peers, with the best rated lawyers rising to the top. It has an advice section where consumers can anonymously ask questions which real lawyers voluntarily answer in forums that everyone can see.

And it has a new service that debuted today: an understandable guide to the law, written by Avvo’s staff, which individual lawyers can customize depending on local legal systems. For instance, the Avvo staff can write a primer on immigration law for consumers that a Los Angeles attorney could tailor to the enforcement practices in the Los Angeles area.

“The mission is to create a free resources for consumers to handle their legal matters with confidence,” Britton said. “Normally, when you need a lawyer, the process of finding a good one can be frightening.”

Britton, who has 16 years of legal experience and was the top lawyer at travel site Expedia, is betting the three legs will generate traffic. He expects to make money through advertising and other means. The site is already making an impact.  (The aforementioned suit was tossed out on First Amendment grounds). Most lawyers are responding positively; in the state of Washington, about 17 percent of lawyers have already filled out their profiles on the site so that consumers can read more about them.

“We can bring more transparency and understanding to the process of getting a lawyer,” said Britton.

Some of the lawyers are aggressively answering questions posed by consumers because they know that such consumers may eventually need to hire a lawyer. Attorneys are now answering thousands of questions a month, with about 90 percent of the questions getting an answer. I asked a question about legal advice for journalists and got a couple of answers within a few hours.

The site is far from just a Yellow Pages site. Avvo collects disciplinary records and makes them available. Britton started the company in 2005 and it now has 24 employees. It has raised $13 million to date from Benchmark Capital and Ignition Partners. Its closest competition are the online Yellow Pages, paid directories such as Lawyerfinder.com and search engines such as Google.

Here’s the latest action:

Lawyers finally sue Avvo – Earlier we reported the angry response of lawyers to the new site, Avvo, which lets users rate lawyers. Well, now lawyer John Browne has followed through on earlier threats to sue, after he decided he didn’t like the profile rating he was given. The rating noted he’d been disciplined by state authorities. The Seattle PI’s John Cook has the story. His suit is even going after Avvo backer, Benchmark Capital. Meanwhile, Avvo’s chief executive responds.

Google beats Cisco in acquisitions of start-ups — So far this year, Google has acquired five venture-backed companies, compared to Cisco’s four, according to VentureOne. (MarketWatch) Until now, Cisco has consistently been the most acquisitive company in Silicon Valley. The emergence of the Google glutton makes sense. With a high market value, Google has the currency to spend.

The bizarre story of Lifelock’s founder — Robert Maynard, founder of Lifelock, an Arizona company designed to help customers avoid identity fraud, has resigned. Turns out, a previous credit-repair company of his had been accused of false advertising and deceptive practices and shut down, that he’d been arrested because of an unpaid $16,000 debt in Vegas, and there’s talk he may have been performed ID theft on his own father — at least according to the reports. This comes shortly after a reported $6 million investment from Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins into the company at a rumored valuation of $40 million (scroll down). Kleiner did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Frontline Wireless may or may not be making progress — Depending on what you read, start-up Frontline Wireless may have gotten a vote of support, or suffered setback in its efforts to open a portion of wireless spectrum to build out a broadband network. Some said Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, endorsed it, but his words appear relative weak, when contrasted to the rather negative remarks by Alaska’s Ted Stevens and others.

Why few blacks, Hispanics and minority women are in venture capital — The NYT’s Matt Richtel takes a look.

Apple to sell music through Bebo’s social network — Details here on Apple’s first deal with a social network.

Benchmark backs three of the top-ten massively multiplayer online worlds (MMOs) — Details here. It has invested in Gaia, Habbo Hotel and Second Life, which are only three of the top ten that are venture backed.

Mahalo now paying users to write search engine results — Jason Calacanis is offering to pay $10 to $15 per search result written at his new Web site Mahalo. This follows his efforts at his former employer, AOL’s Netscape, to pay users in an effort to compete against Digg, and which didn’t seem to go very far.

Sony talks to acquire Club Penguin are off — So says Paid Content

AT&T works with Hollywood studios and labels to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major Internet provider to do so.

Microsoft announces deal with Linspire — Microsoft continues to strike deals with companies that offer services with the competing Linux operating system. The latest deal with Lindows offers interoperability, collaboration and intellectual property assurances (that Microsoft will not sue), and comes after Microsoft feuded with the company over its previous name, Lindows. The accord follows similar Microsoft deals with Novell and Xandros.

Jingle Networks wins patent – The Menlo Park, Calif. start-up, which operates the free directory assistance service 1-800-Free-411, has won a patent for answering such 411 calls while also offering recorded advertisements based on the information requested. The company’s statement is here. It could come in useful as much bigger players start to offer similar players. We’ve used the service, and find it helpful. However, we’ve found the ads more monotonous (they are often the same ones, over and over) than we expected.

Avvo is a new company that lets people find good attorneys, letting them seeing how others have rated the lawyers, and whether they have been disciplined. It lets users rate attorneys too.

Avvo is bound to stir controversy. Lawyers given bad ratings are already disturbed. See the story by John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. One poorly rated criminal defense lawyer calls it “a joke.”

This can be a very valuable service. However, it is open to abuse, because many clients don’t fully grasp some matters, and can easily get upset with their attorneys because by default, attorneys lose about half the time. This is the same problem we discussed about Thefunded, where entrepreneurs leave comments about venture capitalists. It also has similarities to Zillow, a a company that places an estimated value on peoples’ homes and which has upset some homeowners

See screenshot below, showing an example of the criminal defense lawyer rating page. For the lowest rated attorneys, the site warns “extreme caution.”

Other competing directories exist, including Martindale-Hubbell, FindLaw and AttorneyPages, but Avvo providers more ways for consumers and other lawyers to provide feedback.

Silicon Valley’s Benchmark Capital and Bellevue, Washington’s Ignition Partners invested $10 million into Avvo in April. We first wrote about Avvo a year ago, when it was still secretive, and after it got its first $3 million batch of capital.