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January 17, 2008
FillFactory Alumni's Startup Goes Large
Cmosis, a semiconductor startup out of Belgium, has a seasoned team and some key patents for making very large imaging chips with large-sized pixels. It is freshly founded and has raised seed capital.
EE Times reported this week that Cmosis NV has raised €1.2M from Capital-E and the founders to fund its operations as it builds up a business developing image sensor products.
The founders are ex-FillFactory people, namely Guy Meynants, Jan Bogaerts, Tim Baeyens, Gerald Lepage and Lou Hermans.
We checked in with Guy Meynants (CEO) because we wrote about FillFactory several times in the past for other publications. Plus, it's memorable because it was one of the first venture-backed exits after the post bubble downturn chilled dealmaking in Europe for several years. The IMEC spinoff was acquired by Cypress Semiconductor for $100M in cash in June 2004.
As an aside to this discussion, another FillFactory alumni, Luc De May, its former CEO, is now with AsicAhead, a venture backed WIMAX chip startup, also based in Belgium.
Meynants said that Cmosis offers image sensor design services, as well as handling the manufacturing of chips for its customers who are mainly in Europe and Japan; typically companies creating new medical imaging (such as X-ray machines) and industrial vision products.
It is a different market than the one that Cypress is addressing with the CMOS image sensors tech that it acquired in the FillFactory deal, but an interesting one.
"X-ray machines use typically very large chips with large pixels," said Meynants. As such, they are hard to manufacture, but this startup has patents on processes that improves the yield and reduces the crosstalk between pixels.
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Posted on January 17, 2008 12:50 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Permalink
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