When it comes to semiconductors, India has generally delivered technology ordered up by big foreign companies. Ineda Systems, a startup with some big-name backers, is breaking from that pattern to develop its own chips for wearable devices.
The company, with about 180 engineers in Hyderabad, on Tuesday is describing its product plans along with $17 million in new funding from sources that include investment arms of Samsung Electronics and Qualcomm.
Ineda’s top executives are known, in part, from helping to build chip operations in India that were once part of Advanced Micro Devices. They have managed to attract some high-profile board members and individual investors.
The company’s chairman is Sanjay Jha, who led Motorola Mobility until its sale to Google and served a long stint heading Qualcomm’s chip operations. Jha was recently named chief executive of Globalfoundries, the chip manufacturing service that combines former operations of AMD and Chartered Semiconductor.
Jha, in an interview, noted that Ineda is one of the first “product centric” chip startups in India. “I think it will be very important in enabling wearables to happen,” he said.
ABI Research estimates that manufacturers in 2014 will sell some 90 million wearable devices–a term that includes smartwatches, activity trackers and products like Google Glass.
A key force behind Ineda’s founding is a belief that chips that were designed for PCs or mobile phones can’t be effectively repurposed for wearables. The main reason is power consumption.
While smartphone users have become accustomed to charging their devices each night, many industry executives think wearable device users will want to go weeks before plugging in. And such gadgets will have batteries that can store much less energy than smartphones or PCs, Jha said.
Gude Dasaradha, Ineda’s chief executive, predicts that what the company calls its WPUs–wearable processing units–will use as little as one-tenth the energy of existing chips used for such applications. The chips will operate up to 30 days without a charge in an always-on mode, he says.
Ineda stresses a “hierarchical” computing architecture that is quite different than the way circuitry is organized on conventional chips.
Most microprocessors give a central role to one or more processing cores of the sort licensed by ARM Holdings, which can run an operating system like Android and related apps. Even in standby mode, Dasaradha says, the operating system is still running, so the chip can’t save that much power when idle.
Ineda’s chips, by contrast, have three different classes of cores. One extremely low-power block of circuitry remains on and exists mainly to talk to sensing devices, which will signal when to wake other parts of the chip up. Another core is designed to run simple apps and the third is a full-on application processor, able to run mobile-style apps, the company says.
Rather than the ARM Holdings technology used in most smartphone chips, Ineda builds chips using technology from rival MIPS, which is now part of Imagination Technologies–a British company that is also one of Ineda’s investors.
Not that Ineda will lack for competition, particularly from giants like Qualcomm and Intel. The latter has come up with a chip called Quark specifically for extremely low-power applications.
Ineda believes that the low cost of engineering talent in India is a big advantage for a chip startup, a category of investment that many venture capitalists avoid because of the expense.
“We thought these dollars were better spent in that kind of a low-cost model,” said Krishna Yarlagadda, Imagination’s president.
He is also serving on Ineda’s board of directors. Another board member is Lip-Bu Tan, president and CEO of chip-design software specialist Cadence Design Systems and founder and chairman of the venture-capital firm Walden International.
Along with the new funding round, Ineda is announcing that Young Sohn, president and chief strategy officer at Samsung Electronics, is also joining its board of directors.
While most of its operations are in India, Ineda’s formal headquarters is in Santa Clara, Calif., Dasaradha says.
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