Achronix Semiconductor, a start-up based in San Jose, California, announced the first closing of a $52 million Series B preferred stock financing for supporting the development of its field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) technology. 
The company's recently-launched "Speedster" FPGAs provide a three-fold increase in performance compared to traditional FPGAs and are aimed at high-performance applications typically dominated by ASICs, such as networking, telecommunications, test and measurement, and encryption. The devices are capable of up to 1.5 GHz peak performance. The first device in the "Speedster" family embeds 20 lanes of 10.3 Gbps SerDes and four independent 1066 Mbps DDR2/DDR3 controllers
The first $43 million of the $52 million financing was closed on Oct. 10, with the remainder to close in the next several weeks.
Investors include Argonaut Private Equity, Battery Ventures, Easton Capital Investment Group, New Science Ventures, and Entrepia Ventures.http://www.achronix.com
- Achronix is headed by John Lofton Holt (founder, chairman and CEO), who previously led Integrated Strategies Group (Formerly Saber Security Solutions), a management technology and venture consulting firm in Washington DC.
The Achronix technical team is headed by Dr. Rajit Manohar (founder and CTO), who previously was an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. He was one of the principal designers of MiniMIPS, the first high-performance asynchronous microprocessor.
