March 7 (Reuters) - Chip startup Efficient Computer said

on Thursday it had raised $16 million in a seed funding round

led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Eclipse to help fund

work on its low-power chip designs.

Pittsburgh-based Efficient developed a new design, or

architecture, for its chips that focuses on producing processors

that use the least possible amount of energy. Called Fabric, the

architecture was developed by Efficient's founding team over

seven years at Carnegie Mellon University.

"This new architecture allows us to target software in a

more efficient way," CEO Brandon Lucia said in an interview with

Reuters. "It's a more efficient way of executing programs."

Efficient has built a test chip called Monza and plans to

use the funding help with research and development, and

go-to-market to begin to sell chips.

The company will market the chips to customers in industries

such as health devices, civil infrastructure monitoring,

satellites, defense and security. Devices running on chips that

use a tiny amount of power will last longer in the field without

the need for replacement power.

Chip giants such as Intel ( INTC ) and Qualcomm ( QCOM )

already make chips for those markets. Arm

produces a competitive architecture.

Beyond the hardware, Efficient has produced a set of tools

that allows software developers to easily transform, use and

optimize computer code for use on its processors.

"There's a lot of innovative software (development) that

they're doing but they're also able to leverage a lot of the

work that has been done in the ecosystem already through open

source development projects," Eclipse Partner Greg Reichow said.