Silicon Magic Corp, Cupertino, California raised $17.9m in its second round of financing to add to the $7m raised in the first round. The company is developing high-performance embedded memory – memory designed to reside alongside logic on the same chip. Corporate investors this time around were Oki Electric Industry Co, Yulon Group Inc and Iljin Group, putting up $8.5m; funds managed by Needham & Co, and Unterberg, Harris Interactive Media LP put up $3.6m, employees chipped in $2.1m and consultants and private investors were good for $3.7m. Investors in the first round were primarily employees of the company, with 10% invested by Oki. The company is initially aiming its parts at high bandwidth graphic and video applications for multimedia home and laptop personal computers, but sees the the core-plus-memory devices being used in digital set-top decoder boxes, consumer digital audio and video systems and three-dimensional games. It points out that a 0.35 micron chip can pack either 8Mb of memory – 64M-bits – or 1m logic gates, or 4Mb and 300,000 logic gates to create a RISC CPU core with signal processing functions performing at greater than 100MHz, plus 4Mb of high-speed memory.
