Chipidea - Analog and Mixed-Signal IP

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Introduction

In August Chipidea Microelectronica, SA issued a press release claiming to be the number one worldwide supplier of analog/mixed-signal IP according to the Gartner Dataquest Semiconductor Intellectual Property report issued in May. The firm had revenue growth of 35% in 2005 to around $20 million. In October they announced a wide portfolio of programmable sigma-delta analog-to-digital converters.

The firm is unusual in the EDA industry in that it is headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal. Jose Epifanio de Franca is the Founder and CEO. He is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Engineering University (IST = Instituto Superior Tecnico) in Lisbon, Portugal. He also founded the University's Integrated Circuits and Systems Group in 1987 and the IST Centre of Microsystems in 1994. He himself is a graduate of IST (1978) and earned a doctorate at Imperial College of Science and Technology in London in 1985. He has more than 300 publications to his credit. He was recognized by the president of Portugal "Grand Officer of the Order of Merit” and at one point he was Secretary of State for Education Resources. Franca is an IEEE Fellow. Among other things he was the General Chair of the 1998 IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems, held in Lisbon, the Vice General Chair of DATE 2001, and the General Chair of DATE 2002.

A second co-founder and now Chief Technology Officer is Carlos Azeredo Leme. I had an opportunity to interview him recently.

Would you provide us with a brief biography?
I am a Ph.D. from ETH Zurich, Switzerland (1994). I joined Chipidea at its beginning. I am one of the founders. In the start I headed the IP division, one of the engineering divisions, which is now IP Solutions. For two years now I have been CTO of the company. That's basically my progression here.

The company is headquartered in Portugal. You got your Ph.D. in Switzerland. How did you get together with the other founders?
We got it together here in Portugal. The real father of all this is our CEO, Professor Franco. He was professor at the technical university here. He created a research group that had very good visibility internationally. I was part of his group since the beginning along with some of my colleagues. I got the opportunity of going abroad to a very good school for a Ph.D. Then I came back to the same research group. A couple of years later we created the company.

What was the source of the initial funding?
The company was initially funded with $35K. That was all the funding we had at the beginning. We had a big customer in Atmel, also a cofounder. Since then we have grown our customer base very drastically. During the initial years we grew almost 100% every year both in revenue and in resources. Now we have about 240 people with $20 million in revenue last year. In the meantime we have had additional capital investment in the company. Today the founders have a minority ownership.

Editor: On November 30, 2005 Chipidea announced that R Capital Technologies, an international venture capital fund managed by Rothschild invested nearly 5M� in the firm. On May 13, 2005 the firm announced that Kennet Venture Partners led a Series B funding round for a total of 12M Euro.

Would you give me an overview of the company?
Chipidea is the number 1 analog/mixed-signal IP provider according to the Gartner report since 2004. We support over 12 fabs and 45 CMOS processes with a broad array of functions. You could say that we are a one-stop-shop for mixed-signal. Chipidea can provide almost any need in analog and mixed-signal in almost any foundry and almost any process node. That's a short and concise way to describe our company. We have plenty of customers around the world including many of the leading semiconductor companies. We target communications, digital media and consumer electronics. We put a lot of attention of attention on quality. That shows in the very high level of repeat business.

The portfolio of Chipidea is distributed among three divisions: IP System Solutions that covers power management, audio, communications and RF; IP Connectivity Solutions that covers mainly USB (our most popular IP); and Data Conversion Solutions that is focused on designing better converters both ADC and DAC.

How does the revenue breakdown between these three divisions?
IP Systems Solutions and IP Connectivity Solutions are about the same with each accounting for about 2/5 of revenue and Data Conversion Solutions accounting for the last fifth.

Would you expect that revenue breakdown to continue or to shift? Would one area grow more rapidly than the others?
They are relatively stable.

Sigma-Delta converters are developed within IP System Solutions. These are highly oversampled converters. They are operating at much higher frequencies than needed. This allows us to trade-off peak performance for resolution. We can start with a lossey converter. By properly increasing the speed of operation we can obtain a very high resolution. For higher frequencies the preferred technology for converters is Nyquist, mostly pipelined over 10 MHz. Below that it is the territory of Sigma-Delta modulators. They are targeting high resolution. They are a good complement to pipelined converters. They are very popular for voice and audio applications.

Chipidea's success in this field is due to the fact that we have strong know-how in analog and mixed-signal technology. There is strong pressure from the market to develop Sigma-Delta converters. These converters have advantages over other technologies because they exploit very well the speed of the most advanced technology.

What are the target application areas?
Customers have been using Sigma-Delta converters in many applications. It supports multiple wireless, wireline and other general purpose standards, for example in cellular (GSM, GPRS, EDGE, WCDM/UMTS), in mobile television (DVB, DBM, ISDB), for power line (PLC), FM radio and other general purpose high resolutions ADCs. Our customers are IDMs (Integrated Device Manufacturers), ASIC and ASSP vendors and fabless companies.

The distinctive feature of our IP is programmability. We have a platform for sigma-delta modulators that is highly programmable in a very efficient way. We can cover signal bandwidth ranging from 100 kHz up to 5 MHz, almost two orders of magnitude with two modes of operation. It can either work in high performance mode or low power mode. In the low power mode you must trade off some performance but you have much reduced current consumption.

The decimeter filters are also highly programmable that comes naturally because they are digital. This programmability does not come at the expense of electrical characteristics. The current consumption is very competitive. The current consumption is only 4.5 mA for 64 dB resolution in 3 MHz bandwidth which is quite good. The area is also very small, less than .4 square millimeters using digital process, no special option for a node. This can be provided as a single stand alone converter or as a matched IQ-ADC pair or as the most popular version a complete analog front end. Our front end includes many functions such as analog filters, offset calibration, digital filters and so forth. It can also include PLLs for generating the over sampled clock. The configuration of the analog front end can be tailored to our customers' needs. We can provide a complete self-contained solution.

The key advantages are multimode operation, very low power consumption leading to maximized battery life, low floor area leading to low production costs. The programmability is achieved in a very efficient way, basically at no cost. It is a very robust converter because of the high oversampled nature. This means that all bands you would have on a pipelined converter get filtered out. It is much less sensitive to substrate and power supply cross talk. We have IP available today at several foundries and process nodes. We have an efficient methodology to migrate it to new technologies. This gives us a very fast time to market for new instantiations. It is a mature technology. We have been working on sigma-delta converters since the beginning of the company, 10 years now.

Today we have sigma-delta ADCs available at TSMC and UMC at 180 nm and 130 nm. We have under development the instantiation for 90 nm and 65 nm. Very mature IP ready to be instantiated at any technology from 130 nm to 65 nm.

What is the target date for availability at 90 nm and 65 nm?
Typically the development, the porting time, is below 3 months. Within that timeframe we can have the IP ready on any technology. Of course, it must then be fabricated and characterized to prove it is good operation.

If someone wants a particular product at 90 nm, when would it be delivered?
The process normally involves a complete solutions engagement. It is very rare that a customer requests a single sigma-delta modulator. We normally provide a complete solution tailored to our customers applications. Normally there is a need for a programmable identification, some analog filtering, and offset calibration. Digital functions and filters are normally included in the analog front end. We provide a complete solution.

So customers do not simply pick IP out of a catalog?
On our website you can see plenty of analog front ends. Many of them include sigma-delta modulators inside. The key advantage of the IP we are providing and announcing is that it is not just another sigma-delta modulator. It is highly programmable. It supports multimode operation. That is very important today where you already hear of companies coming to market with multimode baseband processors, for example support in GSM, wideband CDMA and mobile TV. This IP fits very well to those applications. It can be embedded on the same die. With a single IP that can cover all the modes of operation.

How does Chipidea sell its IP?
We have a lot of word of mouth, a lot of customers referring us to others. We have of course our website. We also have a lot of inquiries from Design and Reuse web portal. Chipidea has a lot of visibility there. We receive many requests from that site.

The majority of sales of Chipidea are direct. It is one engineer referring another engineer. They contact Chipidea through a variety of means and then Chipidea engages with the customers directly.

Are the sales people employees or distributors?
They are normally employees of Chipidea. This would be the majority of the time.

In September Chipidea hired Didier Lacrois as Senior Vice-President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing to be based in Los Gatos, CA. he was the CEO of Discera Inc and also was vice-president and general manager of MEMSCAP's wireless business unit. Lacroix also has held senior management positions at Synopsys.
We are expanding ourselves.

What was the goal of bringing him on board?
He just started a couple of months ago. His main goal in terms of what he will add to the company is that there is a large need to continue to develop partnerships throughout the industry. Chipidea has very well established and strong relationships with the foundries. We would expect that the new VP of Marketing would assist with relationships not only with the foundries but outside of that. He is helping with a lot of initiatives. To see some results we have to give him some time. That will definitely be part of his role along with driving a lot of the marketing functions for Chipidea.

What does Chipidea deliver to the customer? The company website mentions integration kits?
We deliver design kits which include GDS II, the core, all the view necessary for its integration, documentation and technical information.

If a prospect is interested in some of your IP, how do you persuade that prospect that your IP will meet his requirement?
This is why we have such a small sales force. We engage engineer to engineer. Once we have a prospect or customer with an inquiry, we very quickly put them with our engineering team to work on a solution. We understand their requirements. We can drive the solution.

What is the arrangement with the customer: development fees, licensing fees, royalties,..?
It is an IP business model. It is licensing and royalties. We do not offer design services. We understand the need and provide the complete solution on our IP.

You don't do design services, which means precisely what?
We do not do design for hire.

So you customize the IP that your already have to satisfy a customer's requirements and deliver it as an integration kit.
That is one way of saying it. We find the best fit to existing IP and then migrate it. Normally, it is to a different process node or from one foundry to another or sometimes tune it to a new application.

How do you determine the price of your IP?
Laugh. I would not know how to answer that. It is a negotiation. The most standard blocks have established prices on the market. Chipidea is not the only provider.

Who do you see as Chipidea's main competition?
In truth there is no real competition and there are many competitors. There is no company like Chipidea with broad IP portfolio capable of providing complete solutions. But we have many competitors in specific application areas. In data converters we have competitors; in power management we have competitors. But if a customer is looking for a one-stop-shop where he can get all of his IP from one single vendor, there is not much other than Chipidea. If you consider internal engineering team within large IDMs, we could characterize them as competition. The internal team at Philips would be competitors if we tried to sell to Philips.

How do you convince these large IDMs that it is smarter to use Chipidea IP rather than use their internal resources?
Good question! We have had a lot of success. Most of our major customers are IDMs. We need to show the highest possible quality and best service. We need to show that they can get better service from Chipidea than if they use their own resources. Also these large customers sometime have different groups that do not cooperate well with each other. They have their own problems. Sometimes it is easier to come to a company like Chipidea to get their problem solved.

How do you protect your IP? Licensing agreements, encryption, …?
Our design kits do not contain the schematics. So there is already some protection. Our agreements state very clearly the ownership of the IP is Chipidea. The customers have the commercial right to exploit the IP but they can not resell it. They use the GDS to produce the chips but they can not resell the IP.

Could the customer modify your IP?
With most agreements they can not.

It is well known that IP protection is weak in certain geographies. Is this a challenge for Chipidea?
We have different models. In Asia especially in China we have a process that is supported by the foundries. This process is to merge at the foundry which means that the customer only sees an abstract. The GDS goes directly to the foundry. The foundry merges the GDS with our customer's chip. This process works very well.

What is Chipidea's revenue by geography?
One third North America which is mainly the US, one third Europe and the other third Asia.

The website breaks down product by IP portfolio, ASIC, turnkey solutions and ASSP solutions. How does the revenue breakdown among these categories?
I have been working only in IP. The ASSP is only a starting activity. We do not have product in the market yet in this area. In terms of business turnkey solutions is much lower than IP.

What information is downloadable from your website?
You have a product overview, normally one to two pages of information. After sending in a non-disclosure agreement, we can send technical information. We can put the customer/prospect in contact with engineering.

What about your IP demonstration boards?
They are mostly for USB. We have boards we can ship to our customers for evaluating. That's basically it. We have more than 400 IP products. It is not practical to make boards for everything. USB is our most popular IP. It accounts for about one third of our revenue. We have much more marketing material prepared in this area.

Over the next two to three years, where do you see the growth coming from for Chipidea?
Maybe RFCMOS.

Would you give us a quick summary?
We have introduced a new line of sigma-delta ADCs with which we can support our customers in the embedded IP market. It is a very mature IP. We offer low risk and fast time to market. They are highly optimized for high resolution and low power. They are highly programmable so that we can support multiple applications with the same IP.

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