Chip Express Corporation, of the Haifa-based Elron group, specializes in the manufacture of made to order semiconductors. In professional terms: the company makes high-performance, high-density ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) devices, using a 24-hour laser-personalized prototype, a low volume fast-turn production service and cost competitive high-volume production.
Chip Express itself stands before a serious transition, a new stage in development: the transition from a research and development group, established as a project within holding company Elron, to a commercial company which supplies services to electronics manufacturers.
From its headquarters in Santa Clara, CA, Chip Express has penetrated the US and Japanese computer, communications, military, and consumer markets. The company has done over 400 different designs in its Santa Clara service center for leading companies, among them HP, Compaq, IBM, Adapter, 3DO, Fujitsu. Chip Express plans to increase activity and is even considering a Wall Street IPO.
The company employs 110 persons, of them 40 in Israel. Chip Express’ wholly owned subsidiary, Chip Express (Israel) performs all R&D support and manufactures the QuickTime real-time computer and image processing system for automatic laser cutting of silicon wafers.
One way the company has expressed its change is in seeking out the military and defense industries market niche. “This is a large and varied market and its volume demands specialized components in limited quantities, which suits our proprietary concepts and tools,” says Uzi Yoeli, Vice President of R&D Chip Express Israel.
Chip Express was started in late 1985 as a R&D group within Elron, as part of the Matam incubator project. The company was founded to develop an idea suggested to Elron president Uzia Galil by Zvi Or-Bach, at the time Chief Engineer at Elbit Computers. Or-Bach is the president of Chip Express today. The idea was to develop a machine for the rapid manufacture of made-to-order prototypes, using a laser based system to “personalize” one silicon wafer at a time. Engineering prototypes are made at a rate far faster than the accepted world standard, and customers may be furnished with a prototype within 24 hours.
The company reported $18 million in sales for 1995, compared with $10 million in 1994 and $500,00 in its first year of US activity.
Cooperation between Chip Express and the Tower Semiconductor plant in Migdal Haemek has developed recently, and now includes joint R&D on a series of 0.6 micron technology products. As part of this cooperative venture, in June the company announced to the US press the release of CX2000, a new generation of high-performance sub-micron ASIC, with up to 200K usable gates and RAM/ROM of up to 128K bits.
Up until now, marketing efforts were focused on sales to large PC manufacturers, and of the world’s top ten computer concerns, six are Chip Express customers. The company’s clients include Apple Computers, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Bay Networks, 3Com, Lockheed, and Sony.
The company’s “manufacturing and supplying customers with complex custom chips, that can be manufactured in moderate quantities within a week or two, in as little as 24 hours” was called “an astonishing capability” by the San Jose Mercury News, in a July 1995 feature article about Chip Express. The paper said that, based on expert opinions, “the company could turn into a $100 million company in a few years.”
Chip Express’s board of directors is set to decide whether or not to go public, perhaps within the coming months. “The company is profitable and well-suited to an IPO,” Uzi Yoeli says.