Forza and inSilica Profiles

Semiconductor Times compiled Forza and inSilica profiles for its February 2007 issue.

About Forza:

Forza Silicon was founded in 2001 to provide mixed signal IC design services and products. In May 2004, the company raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from strategic investors (customers), and has no current plans for seeking additional capital. Forza has more than 20 employees, mostly mixed-signal designers.

Forza founder, Barmak Mansoorian, PhD., authored several of the patents in the CalTech APS patent portfolio. Dr. Mansoorian worked with Eric Fossum, PhD. (now the CEO of Siimpel and previously the CEO of Photobit), on APS technology at NASA JPL and Photobit, before co-founding Forza.

The company’s strategy is to offer both IC design services and specialized IC products. Forza argues that it has no competitors in terms of CMOS image sensor design services.

The company has designed ASIC driver for Siimpel.

Forza has foundry experience with IBM, Tower, ST, Freescale, TSMC, UMC, Vanguard, AMS, AMI and Magnachip.

From inSilica profile:

inSilica was founded in 2003 on an Indo-US model, where executive and engineering leadership is driven in Silicon Valley, combined with a highly skilled and scalable India-based implementation team. Company headquarters is in Santa Clara, California and major design centers are in India and Slovenia.

In April 2004, inSilica closed $10 million in Series B funding from New-Path Ventures and Flextronics. Flextronics had expanded its silicon development capabilities by partnering with inSilica as its SoC development partner. In July 2006, InSilica closed $18 million in new financing from Intel Capital, Flextronics, Crossbow Ventures, Dow Ventures, and NewPath Ventures.

inSilica provides advanced standard mobile imaging solutions to bring high end digital still camera quality to the mobile phone market at minimal cost impact. The company’s Image Signal Processing solutions take raw output from the low cost CMOS sensor, compensate for lens defects, noise, and color issues, perform extensive analytics for automatic exposure settings, and use proprietary enhancement algorithms to deliver a very high quality photographic image in all light conditions.

InSilica recently unveiled its next generation image processor for the mobile phone segment. The INS-3510 brings full 3 & 5 Megapixel Digital Still Camera class capabilities to lower cost mobile phones. It includes features such as Advanced Adaptive Tone Mapping to ensure color correctness in variety of lighting sources, full auto-functions including auto exposure, auto white balance, and user selectable multipoint autofocus. Through its programmable architecture, additional features such as special effects can be included. The INS-3510 is designed in 90nm CMOS to attain very small die size and low power consumption. Optimized firmware and tuning for all primary image sensor providers enables handset OEMs to use a variety of sensor sources. In 2007, InSilica plans to introduce a series of products covering the full range of the mobile imaging markets.

The company has numerous customer engagements, IP development projects, and partnerships. The INS-3510 provides a dramatic advance in price/performance over its predecessor, which shipped over 4 million units in 2H’06. The company expects handset and camera module customers to launch production systems based in the INS-3510 in Q1’07.