20 Most Promising Semiconductor Companies-April-2016 issue

Cover Story

The conference room at the Open-Silicon office in Milpitas, CA is fast transforming into a 'Deliberation Chamber'. A consultation on the nuances of a silicon chip upgrade between the company's design team and the product architects of their IDM client is fast gaining momentum. One of the architects, evidently oblivious to the animated discussion surrounding him, reaches out for a notepad and quietly begins to define the upgrade that will soon be his company's next generation product. Talks levitate to action-the embedded micro-processor needs replacement along with the interface, number of video channels need to double, the audio processing unit needs to be able to handle Dolby surround sound, internal memory size needs to cope with real time video streaming and so on.