Amimon

Herzlia, Israel-based Amimon makes semiconductor chips that serve as the brains of wireless home networking equipment, which transfers data at high speeds from one part of a home to another. With the networking gear, consumers can transfer a high-definition video (with a 1080p resolution) from their PC to a TV in another room. Amimon transfers data without compressing it, since compression can lead to errors. Instead, it prioritizes the video data it transfers based on what is significant, such as only transferring the elements that are in motion in a video.

In the future, that networking equipment can take a video from a smartphone and transfer it to a big screen TV. That’s why the company has raised the new round of money. Amimon creates chip sets that use its Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) networking standard, which competes with other rivals such as the Wireless HD technology developed by SiBEAM. Other rivals include Cavium Networks and Intel; the latter is promoting the WiDi technology.

Amimon is in a race to establish its standard against the rivals, who all have varying degrees of data transfer speed. Amimon’s second-generation technology operates in the 5-gigahertz band, transmits data at 3 gigabits per second, and has a range of about 100 feet. It can pierce through walls and is very responsive (less than 1 millisecond delays).

Amimon has sold hundreds of thousands of chips since 2008. The company says it is ramping up production to deliver WHDI chip sets to multiple consumer electronics makers and makers of computer gear. The company says that its WHDI can be designed to fit in a compact space for mobile devices and operate on low power levels. That will enable smartphones, tablets and other devices to transmit video a short distance wirelessly. Users could use “flick to scroll” apps where they use a tablet to control action for game that they view on a TV.

Yoav Nissan-Cohen, chief executive of Amimon, said that WHDI is the only viable option for connecting handheld devices to a TV. The company was founded in 2004 and it has 85 employees.

The company has raised $65 million to date. Existing investors include Argonaut Private Equity, Cedar Fund, Evergreen Venture Partners, Motorola Ventures, STATA Venture Partners, and Walden Israel. New investors include Chicago-based AMITI Ventures and Taiwan-based Hantech International Venture Capital Corp (H&Q Taiwan Co).

The deal creates a new powerhouse in consumer electronics and wireless technologies. CSR is a leader in personal wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, global positioning system (GPS), FM radio, and Wi-Fi. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Zoran makes consumer digital technology chips such as those used in cell phones, digital cameras and home entertainment.

Under the deal, Zoran shareholders will receive 1.85 ordinary shares of CSR (in American depository shares) for each share of Zoran common stock. Cambridge, England-based CSR will also return up to $240 million to shareholders via a share buyback program.

The companies say they will integrate their technology to create chips for location-aware, connected multimedia devices. Both are large-scale publicly traded companies. In 2010, Zoran had pro-forma revenues of $441 million.

Zoran has always been strong in imaging and video, making chips for DVD players, digital cameras and other devices by the millions. CSR has a lot of wireless technology. But those technologies now have to be integrated into the same chip for connected digital cameras and other devices.

Both companies have around $50 million. By the end of 2011, the companies anticipate being able to cut around $50 million in costs. The price represents about $13.03 a share on Zoran’s common stock, not counting the $240 million share buyback. The deal is about 65 percent stock and 35 percent cash. And the price is a premium of 39.9 percent over the closing price of Zoran on Friday, at $9.32 a share.

Zoran has about $261 million in cash. Upon completion of the deal, Zoran will own 35 percent of the combined company. CSR executives will run the company, while Levy Gerzberg, CEO of Zoran, will join the CSR board as a non-executive director and Zoran will appoint another independent director. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter.

Joep van Beurden, chief executive of CSR, will lead the combined company. J.P. Morgan Cazenove and Rothschild acted as CSR’s financial advisers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Slaughter and May acted as CSR’s legal counsel.  Goldman Sachs & Co. acted as Zoran’s financial advisor and Jones Day acted as Zoran’s legal counsel. CSR’s revenues in 2010 were $800.6 million and its gross profits were $376.6 million.

That includes Sequoia capital-backed Meraki, a provider of wireless networks and access points that users can manage through the Internet. Meraki announced today that it has raised $15 million in its third round of funding.

Meraki develops software and hardware to create and manage wireless networks for larger enterprises and governmental organizations. The company manufactures actual wireless access points that users can manage through web-based interfaces, similar to some other online companies that offer their services through the web. The company generates revenue from a subscription-based model that includes access to its web services and sales of its routers.

But that doesn’t necessarily make it a cloud computing company — it’s more of a mesh networking company, meaning it lets its users manage a series of interconnected wireless access nodes that serve as receivers and broadcast points. Cloud computing involves a series of Web-connected networks and the ability to run services on remote servers, not just having a web-based interface for software. Meraki does use a web-based interface to manage its wireless networks — but users can access their routers from the Internet by definition because they are planted on a network.

Meraki plans to use the funding to spin up its marketing efforts and continue developing new wireless access points. Meraki has tried a few marketing stunts, like supplying four square miles of San Francisco with free wi-fi, but didn’t disclose what kind of marketing plans it has with its $15 million.

The latest round of funding brings Meraki’s total funding up to $40 million. Google has also backed the San Francisco, Calif.-based company, which was founded in 2006. Meraki’s clients include Starbucks, Toyota and Stanford University, and the company said it has deployed around 17,000 networks as of the end of 2010. DAG Ventures and Northgate Capital also participated in the most recent round.

If a big ecosystem comes together around SiBeam’s technology — or that of its rivals — then consumers could enjoy a new wave of wireless products, such as displays that have no cables or PCs that can effortlessly display the highest-quality videos on flat-screen TVs. SiBeam made the announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show, the big tech show in Las Vegas this week.

Both sides are making progress in the march toward faster wireless networking. But there’s no telling yet who will triumph. So some of the consumer electronics manufacturers are supporting both camps. Still other groups, such as the Multimedia over Coax Alliance, want users to transfer data within the home over cable TV wiring.

SiBeam’s chips can wirelessly transfer data at 4 gigabits a second across a distance of 10 meters. Beyond that, the data rate degrades with increasing distance but can reach beyond 30 meters. At its fastest, the wireless transfer speed is about 10 times faster than traditional Wi-Fi wireless networking. SiBEAM does this by using the higher-frequency 60 gigahertz band of the wireless spectrum.

There is, however, a lot of competition. A group known as the Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) is headed by the rival startup Amimon, which makes wireless networking chips. WHDI announced this week that a number of new consumer electronics companies — Haier, Hisense, TCL and Vivitek — are demonstrating WHDI wireless networking  products at CES. Makers of PCs, tablets, and mobile devices are also showing off WHDI products. Amimon’s technology uses the 5-gigahertz spectrum to transfer data wirelessly as much as 30 meters at hundreds of megabits per second.

SiBeam, meanwhile, said that its supporters include Dell (which will include the WirelessHD capability on a new Alienware M17x R3 gaming laptop). Asus will also use WirelessHD in a couple of laptops. Abocom will introduce WirelessHD docking stations for the iPad and iPhone. Vizio will showcase TV components that use the WirelessHD technology, and Monster will also show off high-definition multimedia (HDMI) adapters using WirelessHD.

Best Buy has also begun selling a WirelessHD in-house wireless networking product. And SiBeam said it has partnered with graphics chip maker Nvidia and contract manufacturer Foxconn. A third consortium, the WiGig alliance, hopes to combine 60-gigahertz technology with traditional Wi-Fi in a new wireless networking standard. SiBEAM supports that effort but is forging ahead with its own products and consortium in the meantime.

SiBeam said it plans to launch its third generation of chips in 2011 and a fourth generation in 2012. Those chips will have better performance at a lower cost, and at some point, SiBeam will support wireless networking in mobile products as well as higher video resolutions. SiBeam was formed in 2004 and recently raised $36.5 million in venture funding.

The Wi-Fi Alliance released a statement yesterday denouncing the white paper as “flawed” and “inaccurate.” Though their response isn’t exactly a surprise, their counterargument merit a look.

First, the Wi-Fi Alliance argues that GE’s test of power consumption used an older protocol of ZigBee (Smart Energy Profile 1.0) that lacks the security and IP communications required for smart grid use. The alliance also took issue with the study’s use of the 802.11b chip, which it says is based on decade-old Wi-Fi technology; it argues that Wi-Fi based on the newer 802.11n standard would have yielded better and more realistic results since it’s the one currently used in real-life smart grid rollouts. Finally, the statement pointed to what it said was a more comprehensive study by the Association of Home Appliances Manufacturers (AHAM) that ruled in Wi-Fi’s favor.

Update: The back-and-forth continues —  Zigbee’s spokeswoman emailed to say that the AHAM study didn’t only rule in Wi-Fi’s favor, but also singled out ZigBee as one of the top performers in its test. (HomePlug Green Phy was also in the top).

A spokeswoman for the ZigBee Alliance responded to Wi-Fi’s salvos with a statement pointing out the use of ZigBee in about 40 million smart meters to date, as well as the technology’s ability to “securely transfer data at very low power rates.” She added, “There are more than 100 — and growing — competitively priced ZigBee Certified products available today, all of which are made by different companies who performed their own due diligence before creating a product.”

It is a high-stakes fight for relevance in what will be a big and important pie. Pike Research estimates that the smart-grid services market will be worth $4.3 billion by 2015, and Zyprme estimated the smart grid market at $21 billion last year and forecast that it will double to nearly $43 billion by 2014. Although GE is just one customer in the smart grid market, it is a behemoth and leads as an aggressive player in smart appliances and an investor in cleantech ventures. The issue seems to mirror the protocol war in the smart grid, where cellular networks, proprietary networks and the WiMax standard continue to battle for adoption, with no hands-down clear winner yet evident.

It’s also not entirely clear who to believe in this battle. GE has already integrated ZigBee into many of its home appliances, Greentech Media notes.

The GE paper tested the two technologies via custom firmware and found that ZigBee consumed less power in a 24-hour period than Wi-Fi, with Wi-Fi having a larger baseline power consumption (chart from the paper is pictured, right). It also found that ZigBee’s simple processors were $11 cheaper than its Wi-Fi counterparts and argued that ZigBee’s mesh network topology was superior to Wi-Fi’s star network topology. The paper was authored by the folks at GE’s Appliances & Lighting division, and looked at ZigBee, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for home area networking for smart appliances. Bluetooth was dismissed for its limited range and its star network configuration, which relies on devices connected to a central hub, as opposed to mesh networking, where each device can act as a node.

This was evidently the same hangup GE’s writers had for Wi-Fi. While the paper notes that both ZigBee and Wi-Fi “can meet data performance needs,” it argues that ZigBee’s mesh network topology is better for reliability and ability to communicate and that it also allows some devices to remain in sleep mode while other parts of the network are active.

Both sides have made their case. What do you think?

[Top image via Army.mil]

The investment was led by Cisco Systems, JAFCO Asia and Technology Venture Partners — and is just the latest move by Cisco to expand into the home.

Avega Systems has headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. and R&D based in Sydney, Australia.

From the statement:

Avega’s Aios™ technology platform is aimed at enabling whole-home, multi-zone connectivity to content from a range of sources including Internet radio, media center PCs, portable media players, cell phones, legacy AV components, networked storage and set top boxes. The technology also solves problems associated with the control and management of the devices and content based on established and emerging wireless and wired networking standards, including Wi-Fi. Aios™ is being made available to established brand partners on an OEM basis.