Start-Up’s Profile: Link_A_Media Devices

Company:
Link_A_Media Devices (LAMD)

Location:
Santa Clara, CA
 
Born in:
March 2004
 
Funding:

• Series A: exclusively by NEC Electronics
• Series B (April 2008): $22 million, a round led by AIG SunAmerica Ventures, and including KeyNote Ventures, NEC Electronics, Micron Technology and Seagate
• Series C (November 2009): $18 million with Lightspeed Venture Partners leading this round with other investors Itochu Technology Ventures, Keynote Ventures and SunAmerica Ventures

Main executives:

• Hemant Thapar has served as chairman and CEO since founding the company. He was formerly founder and CEO of DataPath Systems from 1994 to 2000, when it was acquired by LSI where he was a senior VP.
• VP of product and technology development, mixed signal VLSI, Jenn-Gang Chern was one of the early employees at DataPath. He was then a Distinguished Engineer with LSI. Prior to DataPath, he worked at Silicon Systems.
• Dr. Dinesh Tandan, VP of manufacturing operations held positions of VP and director of manufacturing, development and operations at DataPath and at LSI, respectively. Previously, he was at Cirrus Logic and NeoMagic.
• Dr. Alfred Yeung, VP of product and technology development, digital VLSI, led the product development efforts at DataPath. He was most recently a director at LSI. Prior to DataPath, he worked on high-speed VLSI designs at Sun Microsystems.

It’s also interesting to note that, among the board’s directors, there are Yuichi Kawakami, president, CEO and chairman at NEC Electronics America, Charles Pope, executive VP, strategic planning and corporate development at Seagate, and Frankie Roohparvar, VP of NAND development for Micron Technology.

Number of employees:
88 according to sources

Revenues:
The company projects revenues of $30 million in 2009 and $100 million in 2010, according to BusinessWeek.

Technology:
Here is a sample of key technology offerings from the start-up for custom SoC development and manufacturing:

• OpenCAD combines the robustness of ASIC development with Customer-Owned Technology (COT) flow to reduce design time and achieve right-first-time designs   
• Silicon-proven high speed PHYs for SATA, USB, SAS and PCIe connectivity cores
• Modules such as wireless and audio/video blocks for integration with the SoC
• DFT flow including MBist/Efuse, Static/At-speed Scan with compression
• System-in-Package (SIP) to integrate DDR, flash or third party IC in single module
• Complete library set for 90nm and 55nm designs
• Support for ARM and other leading processor cores
• Modeling and FPGA level verification to enable concurrent firmware and system level integration and verification prior to tape out.

Products:

• MagLINK: SoC product family for HDD designs with high Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) performance and Adaptive Optimization.
• FlashLINK: a NAND flash controller utilizing iterative decoding data recovery schemes to enable low $/GB for next generation MLC NAND technologies.

Market:
HDD and SSD manufacturers
 
Main competitors:
Marvell and LSI for the HDD market, Intel and start-ups Indilinx and SandForce for the SSD market