US start-up eASIC Corporation, founded by chairman, president and CTO Zvi Or-Bach, an Israeli, today announced the completion of a $17 million financing round, led by Crescendo Ventures. Israeli venture capital fund Evergreen Partners also participated in the round, alongside eASIC’s existing investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and legendary venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, making a private investment.
eASIC develops programmable ASIC products including configurable logic and structured ASIC. Customers can build specific logic and applications to their specifications on these structured processors. eASIC operates in the market segment between FPGA processors (high-energy programmable ASIC processors) and standard cell processors (ordinary ASIC processors). Whereas FPGA processors are fairly expensive and not suited for mass production, standard cell processors are suitable for large scale production of hundreds of thousands of units.
Or-Bach founded eASIC in 1999, after quitting Israeli start-up ChipX Inc. (formerly Chip Express), an ASIC processor developer that he founded in 1987.
Although eASIC is a US company based in Silicon Valley, many of its employees are Israeli. The company’s board includes former Applied Materials president Dan Maydan, KPCB general partner Vinod Khosla, and Raza Microelectronics chairman and CEO Saiyed Atiq Raza, who is on the board of Israeli start-up Mellanox Technologies Inc..
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on October 6, 2005