Semiconductor IP is a relatively established frontier for innovation in Silicon Valley but it is not as easy as it looks. It certainly is not as easy as the two year old start-up Mobiveil has made it look. With a team of more than 100, led by experienced Semiconductor IP professionals, Mobiveil already has a portfolio of silicon proven IP (PCI Express, NVM Express, Serial Rapid IO, DDR4/3, Flash controllers, SPI4.2, 1G and 10G Ethernet) and high profile customers around the world (Samsung, LSI Logic, CSR, IXIA, Sanmina, Silicon Motion, Altera, and Marvel Semiconductor among others). The question you probably have is: Just how did they do it?
If you look at the Semiconductor IP usage trends over the last ten years the number of unique IP per tape-out is increasing while the ability to re-use IP across nodes is dropping. The top fabless semiconductor company IP groups will also be stretched thin supporting multiple fabs and complying with stricter security restrictions on the new FinFET process nodes.
Today, interface IP is dominated by large EDA companies including Synopsys and Cadence, both multi -billion dollar organizations. To successfully compete against large brute force companies, a start-up must be agile and aggressively push the technology while providing superior services, customer support, and leveraging joint development agreements whenever possible.
According to an article in Silicon India last month: Mobiveil started with founding executives and core engineering teams who have worked together for the last decade. The team understands a constantly evolving market, customers, competitors and partners. According to CEO Ravi Thummarukudy, the team’s strength lies in complementary skills and capabilities and a common vision and culture forged over ten years of working together at their previous startup, GDA Technologies, Inc., (GDA). While Thummarukudy brings over twenty five years of experience in semiconductor IP and electronic design automation, Gopa Periyadan supplies business development skills honed managing large sales operations. Technologist Amit Saxena’s contribution is over ten years developing semiconductor IP that has seen successful production in millions of devices. Managing Director of India operations, Srinivasan Durai brings the engineering leadership and India’s talented technology workforce to the company. The team has worked cohesively through the up markets of 1998-2000, 2005-2007 and the down markets of 2001-2003 and 2008-2009. This solid foundation brings unique strength to Mobiveil.
The other critical piece of the semiconductor IP start-up puzzle is sales. I cannot stress more the importance of hiring an experience sales executive early in the development cycle. Mobiveil executed perfectly by hiring LSI, Denali & Cadence IP Sales Veteran, Dale Olstinske (Denali was purchased by Cadence for $315M in 2010). I competed against Dale while working at Virage Logic and can tell you he is one of the top IP sales executives, absolutely.
You can read more here: Mobiveil: Riding the Rapidly Emerging Silicon IP Wave
About Mobiveil, Inc.
Mobiveil is a fast‐growing technology company that specializes in development of SIP, platforms and solutions for the networking, storage and enterprise markets. Mobiveil team leverages decades of experience in delivering high‐quality, production‐proven, high speed serial interconnect SIP cores and custom and standard form factor hardware boards to leading customers worldwide. With a highly motivated engineering team, dedicated integration support, flexible business models, strong industry presence through strategic alliances and key partnerships, Mobiveil solutions have added tremendous value to the customers in executing their product goals within budget and on time.
Mobiveil is headquartered in the Silicon Valley with engineering development centers located in Milpitas, CA, Chennai and Bangalore, India, and sales offices and representatives located in US, Europe, Israel, Japan, Taiwan and People Republic of China. For more information, please visit http://www.mobiveil.com
More Articles by Daniel Nenni…..
lang: en_US
Share this post via:
Semiconductors Slowing in 2025