Silicon Valley startup sprints from zero to 100 million chips in five years

SAN JOSE, USA: Parade Technologies Ltd, a leading vendor of digital display and high-speed interface products, passed an important milestone this week by delivering its 100 millionth IC.

The five-year-old company has quietly emerged as a leading supplier of chips for a variety of popular display and high-speed interface standards used in today’s computers, consumer electronics and display panels. Parade’s portfolio of IC products satisfies the growing demand for HDMI, DisplayPort and SATA display, storage and interface ICs.

“The semiconductor industry is currently enjoying a robust recovery from the previous year. Companies like Parade, and the mass market video technologies they develop, help to drive this industry expansion,” explained Jason Wang, president of UMC-USA, Parade’s key foundry provider.

Parade specializes in ubiquitous digital display chips that pump streams of video data around computer motherboards, through external data ports, over cables to external displays and across the rows and columns of display panels to individual pixels.

Continuous advances in display resolution, color depth, refresh rates and 3D performance require on-going innovation in digital display architecture and interface silicon capability. Parade leverages its close collaboration with market leading Tier-1 OEMs and its active participation in standards-setting bodies to develop ICs that provide unique system capabilities. Parade is a key contributor to the VESA DisplayPort standard.

Advanced technologies for standards-based ICs
While Parade's chips support a variety of video and interface standards, many of the company’s devices share common technologies that offer superior system signal integrity and power efficiency. To overcome the challenge posed by variations in printed circuit boards and interconnect cables, Parade digital interface receiver chips incorporate adaptive equalization.

This advanced technology allows the device to automatically detect and compensate for printed circuit board and cable variations, simplifying systems design and improving reliability.

Parade also pioneered the use of IC sleep modes with low-latency recovery for data interface devices. This technique dramatically reduces power consumption, an increasingly important system requirement.

As a result of the company’s “standards-plus” design philosophy, Parade ICs have been designed into products offered by nearly every leading computer and display vendor worldwide.

Recognized as a startup to watch
Due to its technology reputation and rapid growth, Parade was chosen last year as a finalist for the annual “Start-up to Watch” award by the Global Semiconductor Alliance, an organization representing nearly 500 semiconductor vendors and industry organizations worldwide.

Backed by strategic investors Intel Capital and UMC, and by venture funds Asia Vest Partners and Legend Capital, Parade last raised investment capital in 2007 with a $14.5 million series B round.

The company was founded by a group of experienced technologists and serial entrepreneurs. Parade is led by the co-founders of chip developer Cerdelinx, a company successfully acquired by Lattice Semiconductor in 2002.

“We have worked very hard, and through some very challenging economic times, to achieve this important milestone,” explained Parade Technologies CEO Dr. Jack Zhao. “We have now supplied 100 million chips, proving the continuing validity of the fabless business model.”

Parade Technologies is a privately held fabless semiconductor company that specializes in developing video display and high-speed interface ICs. It seeks to leverage a combination of high-speed analog, mixed-signal and digital design expertise, along with system level knowledge, to take product performance, power efficiency and customer satisfaction to new heights.