Startup targets power problems in wireless IC design

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Paul Cunningham and Steev Wilcox, both recent PhD graduates from the University of Cambridge, England, didn't look for jobs after college. Instead they launched Azuro Inc., an EDA startup that's rolling out a power clock implementation solution this week.

Three years after its founding, U.S.-based Azuro has 27 employees, $4 million in venture capital, 10 patents pending and a product called PowerCentric in use at Broadcom Corp. and now ready for production shipment. The company is targeting the wireless market with PowerCentric, which combines clock tree gating with clock tree balancing and replaces existing clock tree synthesis solutions.

"Most EDA startups are either spin-offs from universities or are people leaving existing corporations, but we really did start with a clean sheet here," said Cunningham, Azuro's CEO. Azuro's technology is not based on research from Cambridge. Cunningham said he got the idea to form a company based on power optimization after serving an internship with computer science guru Ivan Sutherland at Sun Microsystems Inc. Cunningham was designing high-performance micro-pipelined switching fabrics, and he saw first-hand how pervasive the power problem was.

Cunningham returned to Cambridge to finish his PhD and brought Wilcox, now Azuro's chief architect, into the picture. "He's able to take the most abstract idea and immediately turn it into an algorithm," Cunningham said. "I was the kind of guy always floating around with concepts and ideas."

Today, Azuro is located in Mountain View, Calif., and so is Cunningham. Seventeen of its 27 employees are at the R&D center in Cambridge, but there was no doubt Azuro needed to be located in Silicon Valley, Cunningham said. It raised $4 million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital in May 2003

Existing EDA companies and startups alike are addressing the IC power-management problem. But Azuro's approach is different, Cunningham said, because it intends to focus on one problem at a time and quantify the results. "Existing flows have so much inertia that they're not keeping pace," he said. "They're trying to throw everything in and saying that we do it all. There's no thought given to how well they're solving any particular problem."