Startup Omiino raises funds for telecom-specific FPGAs
Posted: Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 11:12 am
Startup Omiino (Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland) has raised a seed funding round of £1.05 million (about $2.1 million) to be used for the development of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) programmed for use in telecommunications network equipment.
Omiino develops “FPGA-based” silicon for telecommunications equipment vendors, according to Gary Hamilton, Omiino’s chief executive officer. The company names FOGA vendor Xilinic Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) as a partner, suggesting that it is programming up Xilinx FPGAs and selling them on.
A quote from the company’s website states “Omiino has responded and by pioneering the process of building solutions on the latest generation of commodity FPGAs,” the company states.
Elsewhere the company states: “Over the next few months we will be rolling out a family of high order framers and packet mappers for packet optical networks in the 10G, 20G and 40G and Ethernet segments. These FPGA-based Omiino solutions will compete aggressively with ASIC-based offerings.”
Their primary backer of Omiino is Crescent Capital, a Belfast, Northern Ireland based venture capital firm which has invested £750,000 (about $1.5 million). The rest of the money was provided by the management team, private investors and bank funding under a small loans guarantee scheme.
“So-called application-specific silicon requires vast up-front investment and verification costs. For telecommunications network equipment vendors the return on investment is getting longer for such devices,” argued Deirdre Terrins of Crescent Capital, in a statement.
In other words Terrins believes that networking companies can no longer afford custom silicon made at the leading edge of manufacturing and will therefore turn to programmable silicon with a lower development cost.
“We are delighted that Crescent Capital has recognised that our teams experience in telecommunications and silicon design gives us a unique ability to tap into this significant market opportunity.” said Hamilton in the same statement.
“We apply industry and silicon design understanding to create market defining industry specific integrated circuits.” he added before going on to say “With Crescent’s support we will be able to start developing our initial product offerings and development road-map. We are already in dialogue with several equipment vendors who have shown considerable interest in our product plans.”
