Friday, July 25, 2008

BitWave brings in $10M in new funding

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

BitWave Semiconductor Inc., a maker of a software-based radio transceiver chip for wireless devices, has closed on $10.2 million in Series B funding, according to federal documents.

Investors in the Lowell-based company include Boston’s TVM Capital, Chicago’s Apex Venture Partners and Virginia’s eCentury Capital. While BitWave officials declined to comment on the funding, it marks the second infusion of cash the company has received this year, following a $5 million round received in January. Officials would not disclose the series of that funding. The company received its first round in 2005, totaling $13 million.

BitWave’s technology is aimed at allowing wireless device makers to build products that can work on any wireless mode, from GSM, EDGE and W-CDMA to CDMA2K, 802.11a/b/g and its newest iteration, 802.11n. The idea is to provide a chip that can be programmed to handle any of the protocols, or change them, after the device has been built. The idea, said BitWave co-founder and chief marketing officer Russel Cyr during a January interview, is to create one chip for a multimode world.

Over the past several months, the company has gained ground in the space and announced its first product — the BW1102 Softransceiver —  in February. The product is programmable for all handsets and femtocells operating on frequencies between 700 MHz and 3.8 GHz, and executives claim it is the first of its kind in the industry.

To help manage the production of the chips, the company signed a deal with Open-Silicon Inc., a fabless semiconductor company with an office in North Andover, in March.

With its sights on both handsets and femtocells, BitWave is looking at a large market. According to Arizona-based research firm Forward Concepts, the femtocell market alone represents a semiconductor opportunity that could show a compound growth rate of 138 percent over the next four years and reach $1.5 billion by 2012. According to the same firm, handset chips generated $9.9 billion in revenue in 2007 and are expected to keep showing growth as new protocols penetrate the market.

While there are many chip companies looking at both the handset and femtocell markets, BitWave’s main competition in the programmable transceiver market is U.K.-based picoChip Designs Ltd.

BitWave was founded in 2003 by Cyr, a former executive at semiconductor developer Global Communication Devices Inc., and CTO Geoffrey Dawe, former CEO and co-founder with Cyr of Global Communications. CEO Mike Farese, formerly of Palm Inc., was appointed last fall, while the company added vice president of business development David Donovan, formerly of Analog Devices Inc., this past April.