It's been a while since we checked in with some of the FPGA startups out there to take a quick pulse check.
Recently I touched base with Kapil Shankar, CEO of SiliconBlue Technologies Corp. and Jack Ogawa, the firm's VP of engineering. They filled me in on some company developments and let me know what I'd missed as far as company demos at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year.
First, a little history. SiliconBlue was one of several promising FPGA startups that we profiled last year as part of a series of articles. The point of the series was that all of the startups sound good on paper, but face the reality that programmable logic is a tough business dominated primarily by two firmly entrenched players, and once-promising startups like MathStar and Cswitch have fallen by the wayside in the tough economy of recent times. One of the things that SiliconBlue has going for it is its focus on low-power, handheld applications. This impressed Bryan Lewis of Dataquest, who told me last year he considered SiliconBlue the most promising of the startups.
When I later sat down with Shankar at the company's offices in Santa Clara last August, he told me that the company had between 40 and 50 design wins. I was impressed.
Fast forward to late last month: one of the first things Shankar told me this time was that the company now "probably over 100 design wins." Basically, SiliconBlue has more than doubled the design wins under its belt in the last several months of 2009. That bodes well for a startup that faces the initial hurdle of persuading customers to go with a supplier that doesn't have a long and illustrious track record.
Shankar said SiliconBlue continues to see traction in applications like feature phones, e-books, pico projectors, digital cameras and others. He said the company sold more than 250,000 units last year.
"We continue to compete primarily with ASICs," Shankar said. "Our benefit is that, just like ASICs, we are able to help customers with IP and custom design solutions, yet provide the time-to-market benefits of FPGAs."
SiliconBlue, which has raised about $40 million in venture capital today, still has money in the bank but plans to seek a series C funding round in the next few months, Shankar said.
Shankar also said SiliconBlue's performance to date has exceeded his expectations for where he'd hoped the company would be at this stage. "We are in the right place at the right time with the right solution," he said.
