Open-Silicon is a semiconductor solutions company founded in 2003 to provide traditional ASIC design, derivative and platform SoCs, and production handoffs where Open-Silicon provides manufacturing operations.

Corporate history

Open-Silicon was founded in 2003. Founder Dr. Naveed Sherwani's idea was to select best-in-class technology from the open market and apply it through an engineering process focused on three goals: low cost, high schedule predictability, and high reliability. In 2011, Open-Silicon became the industry's first company to offer a money-backed design engineering schedule.

Initial funding was provided by Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital is a Californian venture capital firm located on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. The Wall Street Journal has called Sequoia Capital "one of the highest-caliber venture firms", and noted that it is "one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture-capital firms"...

, Norwest Venture Partners

Norwest venture partners

Norwest Venture Partners is a global, multi-stage investment firm focused on investments in early to late stage venture and growth equity investments in U.S...

, and InterWest Partners. Additional funding from those partners, and new partners Artis Capital and Bridgescale Partners, brought the total venture funding in four rounds of financing to almost $46M. In December 2007 Unicorn Investment Bank acquired 75% of Open-Silicon for $190M. As a result, the company is no longer venture funded and the board of directors has evolved including the addition of long-time industry veteran Chris King.

In May 2007, Open-Silicon acquired Zenasis Technologies, a maker of processor optimization EDA software. This technology has become the core of Open-Silicon's MAX Technologies. This technology has also been expanded by Open-Silicon to focus on low power design and process variability management.

In 2008 and 2009, Open-Silicon received the "Most Respected Private Semiconductor Company" Award from the Global Semiconductor Alliance

Global Semiconductor Alliance

The Global Semiconductor Alliance is a non-profit semiconductor organization, which was founded in 1994 , to support the worldwide adoption of the fabless semiconductor business model...

 (GSA).

In 2009 Open-Silicon acquired design services firm Silicon Logic Engineering (SLE). This acquisition has enhanced the company's derivative IC design capabilities. In 2010 the company opened new facilities in Research Triangle Park

Research Triangle Park

The Research Triangle Park is a research park in the United States. It is located near Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill, in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina...

, North Carolina, and Pune

Pune

Pune , is the eighth largest metropolis in India, the second largest in the state of Maharashtra after Mumbai, and the largest city in the Western Ghats. Once the centre of power of the Maratha Empire, it is situated 560 metres above sea level on the Deccan plateau at the confluence of the Mula ...

, India, to provide additional support for derivative IC design.

Locations

Open-Silicon has the following principal locations:

• Milpitas, CA
• North Andover, MA
• Eau Claire, Wisconsin
  Eau Claire, Wisconsin
  Eau Claire is a city located in the west-central part of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The population was 65,883 as of the 2010 census, making it the largest municipality in the northwestern portion of the state, and the 9th largest in the state overall. It is the county seat of Eau Claire County,...
  
  
• Bangalore, India
• Yokohama, Japan
• Kaohsiung, Taiwan
• Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
• Pune, India

Industry impact

Open-Silicon has been instrumental in establishing a new semiconductor segment known as the Fabless ASIC market. Core to the company is the OpenMODEL, which allows customers to view and make decisions about their ASIC supply chain. In the five years from 2003-2008, Open-Silicon completed more than 100 designs.

With its front-end design capabilities growing , , Open-Silicon now provides derivative design solutions for the new design-lite industry segment. In 2011, Open-Silicon announced a relationship with Micron to develop derivative IC products for the Micron Hybrid Memory Cube technology.

Products and services

Open-Silicon's business model is called the OpenMODEL. The OpenMODEL gives customers the option of selecting their IP from the open market, with Open-Silicon qualifying and supporting that IP. In addition to IP, Open-Silicon has relationships with multiple foundries and test and packaging suppliers to maximize customer flexibility.

As part of the OpenMODEL, Open-Silicon offers a variety of IC design and manufacturing services, including product definition, design engineering, wafer fabrication, packaging and assembly, and test engineering. The company offers ASIC products at 180 nm, 130 nm, 90 nm, 65 nm and 45/40 nm 28 nm CMOS process nodes from multiple silicon foundries including TSMC, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, SMIC, and Samsung. IP partners include almost all major open market sources. Open-Silicon was the first adopter of Synopsys's IP OEM Partner Program.

High Speed Processor Design

Open-Silicon uses the CoreMAX tool, initially acquired from Zenasis Technologies but since expanded, for high speed processor design. Open-Silicon and partners were able to demonstrate 65nm processor performance of 1.1GHz worst case, and 40nm processor performance of over 2.4GHz typical case.