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 stag...