Date: 15/01/2013

Fabless semiconductor startup Arctic Sand receives $9.6 million funding

Fabless semiconductor company startup Arctic Sand Technologies, has announced that it has closed $9.6 million in Series A financing at year-end 2012. A syndicate of financial investors—including Arsenal Venture Partners, Northwater Capital and Ray Stata, and strategic investors, including Dialog Semiconductor and Energy Technology Ventures (ETV, a joint venture involving ConocoPhillips, GE and NRG Energy, Inc.)—awarded the funding to the MIT spin-off, which is commercializing energy-efficient power-conversion chips for multiple markets.

Arctic Sand says its Transformative Integrated Power Solutions (TIPS) platform offers significant improvements over existing products, reducing energy loss by 50% via solutions a fraction the size of competitive products. The market for DC/DC converters runs into 10s of Billions $S.

Dialog says DC-to-DC power converters are the underlying building block of today’s power management Integrated Circuits (ICs). Arctic Sand’s patented TIPS (Transformative Integrated Power Solutions) technology uses a unique approach for conversion, based on switch capacitive techniques. The technology facilitates the use of smaller inductive components, resulting in increased efficiency and an overall higher power density factor over and above today’s competing technologies, delivering significant advantages in portable and data centre applications.

“A staggering 80% of energy generated worldwide is lost as heat due to power-conversion losses,” said Nadia Shalaby, PhD, CEO and co-founder, Arctic Sand. “Such excessive power inefficiency results in both unnecessary electricity expenses and significantly oversized distribution and generation in serving the world’s rapidly expanding computing and data storage needs.”

Dr. Shalaby explained that data centers alone spend more than $50 billion annually on electricity—while emitting more CO2 than the entire airline industry. “Arctic Sand’s mission is to help rectify that problem,” she explained. “By cutting power-conversion losses in half and delivering a smaller solution size within the end products, Arctic Sand’s technology empowers device manufacturers to recover energy and space—satisfying the increased functionality demands of their customers. Backed by our financial and strategic investors, we are excited to commercialize technology that will deliver energy savings worldwide.”

Mark Tyndall, Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy at Dialog Semiconductor, said, “As part of our advanced technology development strategy, we support innovative start-up companies for emerging technologies. Arctic Sand’s TIPSTM power management technology, together with their MIT relationship, perfectly complements our technology portfolio and Dialog’s support of such technologies will help us maintain leadership at the forefront of power management innovation.”
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N