Friday, April 12, 2014: Now this can be termed as the real booster to the Indian semiconductor eco-system. India’s wearable devices chip startup, Hyderabad based Ineda Systems, got a major investment of Rs 1020 million courtesy Samsung and Qualcomm. The funding has been provided from venture fund Walden-Riverwood Ventures, Samsung, Qualcomm and UK-based semiconductor R&D company Imagination Technologies.
This is the second round of funding received by the startup. In the first round, two high-profile investors, Sanjay Jha, CEO of Global Foundries and former chairman and CEO of Motorola Mobility, and Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Cadence Design Systems, one of the world’s biggest providers of tools for chip design, invested in the electronics startup.
Ineda’s chips will essentially power wearable technologies including smartwatches, health and fitness trackers, along with the latest in internet-of-things domain. According to a TOI report, Ineda founder Gude Dasaradha said, “This is a breakthrough technology from India. I don’t believe there is an equivalent product in the world.” It is worth mentioning here that the previous venture of Dasaradha, called Cute Solutions, was acquired by chip maker AMD. He became the managing director of AMD India befor he started Ineda.
Acknowledging the growing importance of wearable segment, he said that top 20 companies working on wearable technologies are evaluating Ineda’s products. Dadaradha said, “The feedback from everyone so far is that the processor systems are fantastic. We expect that the first products using these chips will come out by the end of this year.”
The chips made by Ineda reduce power consumption by on-tenth to one-fiftieth, subject to the nature of use and also offers a variety of features integrated into it, including sensor subsystems (to monitor, say, body vitals or movements), speech recognition and always-on capability.
He said, “It was ground-up architecture. We have used a method called hierarchical computing, which does not require high-end processors and where different processors use different light-weight operating systems. I believe we are the first in the world to attempt something like this.” The new funds will help in further development of semiconductor and software products.
