UK semiconductor startup secures funding

A new UK-based fabless semiconductor company, Icera Semiconductor has closed its first funding round for a total of $10 million from Benchmark Capital and Atlas Venture.

A new UK-based fabless semiconductor company, Icera Semiconductor has closed its first funding round for a total of $10 million from Benchmark Capital and Atlas Venture.

The company was established in April 2002 by a team of leading semiconductor executives: Stan Boland and Simon Knowles, respectively, were formerly President and CEO and Vice President Silicon Design, at Element 14, a startup which successfully focused on building the world's highest density DSL chipsets built on a new high performance processor.

Element 14 was acquired in late 2000 by Broadcom Corp for over $600 million.

Nigel Toon was previously the Vice President and Managing Director Europe for Altera Corp and is Vice President, Marketing for Icera.

Steve Allpress is a respected wireless communications expert previously with Lucent, Bell Labs and Broadcom in the USA and is Vice President Wireless Systems for Icera.

" Icera has an outstanding founding team bringing together a wealth of engineering and marketing expertise and experience in creating successful startups", said Stan Boland, the new company's President and CEO.

"We are delighted to welcome Benchmark and Atlas as the first external investors in the company.

Unlike the last industry cycle which was driven by infrastructure build-out, this coming one will be driven by devices that connect to this infrastructure, and that's where we are focused".

Icera has begun building its team of wireless system domain experts and full custom digital design engineers and will be using the very latest processes from leading foundries.

To underpin its system products, Icera is developing a brand new class of processor and this activity is being led by Simon Knowles, the company's Vice President Silicon.

Graham O'Keeffe, Principal at Atlas Venture said: "We were co-lead investor in Element 14 and are delighted to be co-leading this first funding for Icera.

We are confident that this team knows how to build an incredibly successful company".

Mark Evans, General Partner at Benchmark Capital added: "Icera addresses a large market with truly innovative core technology and has near-perfect market timing".

The company expects to announce its first major development facility in the next 2-3 months in Bristol, UK.

(This was Electronicstalk's Top Story on 5 February 2003).

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