The money will see Fulcrum break even in 2007, said chief executive Bob Nunn.
Fulcrum’s interconnect devices do away with the need for a central clock, which means lower power consumption. They are not, however, purely clockless: to communicate with a synchronous world, Fulcrum’s asynchronous designs are encased inside a synchronous chip.
So far, the company has two products in its PivotPoint family, which are switch chips based on the SPI4 interface standard for networking systems. With the injection of cash, Fulcrum will launch similar devices for emerging computing, communications and storage applications.
Nunn said a few new products, codenamed Tahoe, would be released by year’s end. Nunn declined to say precisely which standard Fulcrum would support in its new products. While the Tahoe chips will be targeted for use in data centers, including those of large financial companies, he said.
New investor Granite Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture firm, led the financing round. All of the company’s existing investors, Infinity Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Palomar Ventures and Worldview Technology Partners, also participated.
Since it founded in early 2002, Fulcrum has garnered a total of $56m in VC. The 45-employee fabless semiconductor company, based in Calabasas Hills, California, was spun out of its founders’ research at the California Institute of Technology. Nunn expects to hire between five and ten additional employees during the next year or so, a mix of engineering and sales and marketing folk, he said.
Though compelling, clockless chip technology has struggled for volume commercialization, said Will Strauss, president of researching firm Forward Concepts.
Most semiconductors use a clock source, typically an oscillator, which essentially provides a strobe to move data from one block of logic to another. With each clock pulse, data is moved down the pipeline of logic, to provide some calculation or processing function. The faster the clock, the beefier the computing power (hence the Gigahertz wars between major chipmakers).
Fulcrum’s technology removes the central clock and instead uses handshaking technology that automatically signals the completion of data processing between logic blocks. By doing away with an oscillator and the need for logic blocks to wait around for its tick, clockless designs mean chip use less power and less silicon die than their synchronous counterparts, said Mike Zeile, Fulcrum VP of marketing.
However, analyst Strauss said that while Fulcrum’s chips run at a lower power than clocked chips, they require a larger area of silicon die. Which means more money for designers, Strauss said.
Chief Nunn challenged this and pointed to the company’s dozen or so design wins on PivotPoint. A good handful is from tier one type customers, Nunn said. PCM Sierra uses Fulcrum’s products as a switching element inside their CPU-based products for networking, for instance.
Asynchronous is a broad field and Nunn does not consider other clockless developers, including Intel, which has flash memory products with an asynchronous page read mode, and Sun Microsystems, competitors. Fulcrum uses its own asynchronous memory technology in its products.
Nunn said Fulcrum has had conversations with Sun, but declined to comment further.
Jo Ebergen, a lead engineer at Sun’s 25-person asynchronous technology group, said Sun is not working with Fulcrum but is watching the company’s progress with interest. Fulcrum is one of the asynchronous startups that has, so far, succeeded very well, Ebergen said.
Currently, Sun has four major research projects for asynchronous: proximity communication (as part of DARPA project), architectural explorations, fast arithmetic and CAD tools. And for several years, Sun has used, as a small part of its UltraSPARC IIIi, an asynchronous buffer FIFO.
Notably, Royal Philips Electronics spun off its asynchronous IP arm as Handshake Solutions Inc about a year and a half ago. Last October, UK design powerhouse ARM Ltd signed a joint development and marketing agreement with Handshake for a processor design.
Theseus Logic of Orlando, Florida also is making great clockless strides. CEO David Lamb said other startups, such as Fulcrum, are not its main rival. The chief competition is the clock, he quipped.
