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.