Kandou Bus has secured a USD15 million investment from Bessemer Venture Partners to expand research and accelerate the development and deployment of the firm’s Chord signalling SerDes technology.
Kandou has developed Chord signalling for enhanced communications between chips inside electronic systems ranging from cell phones to servers and high performance computing.
"We see Chord signalling as a game changer in semiconductors," says Bessemer venture capitalist Felda Hardymon. "The demand for higher performance and lower power consumption in computing systems necessitates fundamental changes in semiconductor interconnect solutions. Kandou's technology comes at a time when existing chip link technologies are failing. We are confident that Kandou can further develop and deploy Chord signalling in several future generations of chips."
Kandou CEO and founder Amin Shokrollahi's extensive background in information theory and coding-based signalling led to the invention of Chord signalling. The technology delivers two to four times more bandwidth and half the power consumption of traditional differential signalling. It achieves this by sending multiple bits over multiple correlated wires within each clock cycle versus differential signalling's one bit over two correlated wires. In addition to improved performance, the result is better board, pin and silicon area efficiency as compared to existing chip interface solutions.
The financing announcement comes after several other key milestones in 2016 including presenting a paper at DesignCon that was recognised as a "Best Paper", announcing Marvell Technology Group as a licensee of Kandou's Glasswing chip-to-chip link technology, and Kandou's Glasswing IP compliance with the newly-released JEDEC specification for multi-wire interfaces.
"Bessemer's investment provides Kandou the opportunity to significantly expand research and development for Chord signalling architectures and solutions," says Shokrollahi. "We're seeing growing demand on multiple fronts for our Chord signalling technology, and we are now much better positioned to meet this need."
