Swiss fund backs innovative chip design firm

Kimotion aims to boost analog integrated circuit design productivity. Comit Systems Inc

Index Ventures, based in Geneva, is taking an active part in the creation of a new company called Kimotion Technologies.

The Swiss-based venture capital firm, with offices in Europe and the US, led a $3.83 million venture capital investment in the company, headquartered in Le Vaud.

Co-investor in the early stage company is France’s Innovacom SA.

Index helped to spin Kimotion Technologies Inc out of the Microelectronics and Sensors lab at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. It also took a board seat, along with Innovacom, and helped to find top management for the startup company.

Kimotion is developing electronic design automation (EDA) software that can boost the productivity of semiconductor engineers who have to design analog integrated circuits.

Despite the EDA field of beginning with analog design tools, the majority of products developed in the past ten years are targeted at digital design.

International expertise

Experts say that analog and mixed signal design is an area that has so far resisted automation to any great degree, but there a handful of companies are making a go of it, such as Barcelona Design, based in Silicon Valley and Analog Design Automation, based in Ottawa, Canada (recently acquired by Synopsis Corp).

It is too soon to say if Kimotion’s tools are successful in the market. It is only working with R&D partners at the moment, CEO and co-founder, Oscar Buset is not saying how far the firm is from coming to market with a complete product.

Buset is an experienced startup company manager. He sold his last venture, Snaketech Corp, also an EDA company to Simplex Solutions (now part of Cadence) in 2000.

The company will retain an R&D base in Leuven but its headquarters are in Switzerland.

by Valerie Thompson