Champaign, Illinois based Intersymbol Communications, a developer and manufacturer of 10 Gbps physical layer integrated circuits for broadband optical networking systems, has raised $1 million in funding, bringing the Series B round to a close with $5 million.

Intersymbol completed a first round of venture financing in June 2001. The round was led by Indianapolis based venture capital firm CID Equity Partners, and also included Washington based venture firm Telecommunications Development Fund and the Champaign Urbana Venture Fund.

Intersymbol's most recent round of venture financing closed in September 2002, and was led by Champaign based venture capital firm Open Prairie Ventures and included Intel Capital, Madison based venture firm Venture Investors and existing investors.

Intersymbol's high-speed optical receiver IC's, which are meant for next generation long-haul and metro optical networks, incorporate custom signal processing techniques, architectures and circuitry at optical data rates.

"The introduction of signal processing elements results in dramatically increased tolerance to signal dispersion and distortion as compared to conventional clock-data-recovery (CDR) optical receiver IC's. The impact for carriers and network providers is the ability to reduce the probability of network "outage," increased performance of existing optical links and deploy next generation networks with dramatically lower cost," says Naresh Shanbhag, CTO of Intersymbol.

Shanbhag co-founded Intersymbol in October 2000 along with Andrew Singer. Both the founders are faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

With a Ph.D. from University of Minnesota, Shanbhag began his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories where he was the lead chip architect for very high-speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) ICs.

Since '95, he is a faculty member in at UIUC with research focus on developing low-power and high-performance technologies for the design of next generation communication ICs.