SiliconBlue takes $24M for low-power mobile chips
SiliconBlue, a company that provides programmable logic chips for use in mobile devices, has landed $24 million in a second round of funding led by New Enterprise Associates and including BlueRun Ventures and Crosslink Capital.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company plans to sink its new funds into scaling its operations. It has raised a total of $40 million in venture capital since it spun off from semiconductor company Kilopass Technology in 2006.
The chips it produces, called field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips, allow for high processing performance on a very low amount of power. This makes them ideal for battery-powered mobile phones. This is an intensely competitive field, including Xilinx, Altera and Intel, but SiliconBlue’s new 45-nanometer processor won’t require external configuration memory, which could give it an edge.
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