StarGen Scores $15.5M

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. -- StarGen, a fabless semiconductor company and the first to market with serial interconnect solutions based on the Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI) standard and PCI Express (PCIe), announced today it has successfully raised an additional $15.5M round to fund next generation development and sales expansion. This round complements the prior round, closed in June 2004, bringing total capital invested in StarGen for ASI development to $24M.

Investors in both rounds include; Morgenthaler, Vesbridge Partners, Intel Capital, Commonwealth Capital, Eastward Capital Partners, and Ironside Ventures.

“System OEMs in compute, storage, and communication markets are beginning the move from in-house development of application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which take hundreds of man years and often tens of millions of dollars in development expense, to products based on open standards from merchant silicon providers like StarGen”, commented Tim Miller, President and CEO. “With our AXSys product line of ASI/PCIe compliant switches, bridges, and software, our customers can get to market for roughly 1/10 the cost and 1/2 of the time compared to custom approaches. In addition, they benefit from an open standards sourcing model, providing risk mitigation and cost benefits.”

The market for standards-based system area interconnects, which are used to connect multiple processors and system components together at rates up to 16Gbps, is expected to grow by >500% from late 2004 to $375M by early 2008 according to Jag Bolaria, Senior Analyst at the Linley Group. Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI) is developed and maintained as an open standard by the ASI-SIG (www.asi.org), composed of over 60 companies. ASI extends the capabilities of PCI Express by adding features which enable true peer-to-peer processor communication, advanced QoS, high availability, and native support for a wide variety of protocols routinely used in communication and storage applications. These capabilities are mandatory for use in emerging standard platforms such as AdvancedTCA.

“The StarGen team is composed of proven innovators and business leaders”, said Zenas Hutcheson, Managing Partner of Vesbridge Partners. “We have been involved with the company since they were founded and have worked actively with them over the past several years to develop this new high performance switched interconnect model that is clearly required for continuing innovation in blade server, storage array, and next generation communication systems.”

“Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI) is a fundamental extension of PCI Express that is critical to system designers who need to add advanced quality of service, high availability, and multi-protocol features to their next generation systems,” said Tim Coll, Logic Analyzer Marketing Manager with Agilent Technologies. “Agilent is pleased to collaborate on ASI development with an industry leader like StarGen.”

StarGen Inc.