Bitwave raises $10 million for reconfigurable transceiver chips
Bitwave Semiconductor has raised $10 million to help get its first chip to market after five years of development.
Investors included Apex Venture Partners, ECentury Capital Partners, and TVM Capital. Those same investors provided the $13 million first round for the company in 2004, VentureWire reported.
The Lowell, Mass.-based company is designing a reconfigurable transceiver chip, dubbed the BW1102 Softransceiver. It is expected to hit the market by the end of the year. The plan is to create a silicon radio that can be reconfigured to work at any frequency, making it highly flexible to run any wireless protocol. The company could, for instance, reprogram the device to do something different, depending on what its customers want the chip to do. Such chips are useful in environments with constantly changing wireless standards.
The company is targeting markets such as cell phones, femtocells (which provide cell phone coverage inside homes or apartment buildings), and wireless data cards. Competitors include big companies such as Broadcom as well as start-ups such as Sirific Wirless, AsicAhead, GrowthWorks, and Xceive.
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About the Author, Dean Takahashi
Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.