A dozen companies to watch in the IPO landscape

LONDON — Initial public offerings of shares (IPOs) in semiconductor companies have been rare over the last few years and that has had an inhibiting effect on venture capital investment in startups.

However, Avago Technologies Inc. conducted a successful IPO in August that raised $648 million that helped change the mood.

A number of companies filed their intentions to stage IPOs in the last days of 2009. These included MaxLinear, Telegent, Sensata and Solyndra.

It is remarkable how quickly a market can turn from untouchable to a race. Companies that come late to the next IPO market could find investors' appetites have been sated by the early birds.

Here is a list of a dozen companies that could be eyeing an IPO over the next year to 18 months. The first eight are courtesy of the Global Semiconductor Alliance. The other four were thrown in by EE Times:

Ambarella Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.): multimedia ICs

Aptina Imaging Corp. (San Jose, Calif.): the imaging sensor company was spun out of Micron Technology Inc. (Boise, Idaho) in June 2009 with a majority interest sold to Riverwood Capital and TPG Capital. Micron retains a minority interest.

Beceem Communications Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.): is a 4G communications chip company

eSilicon Corp. (Sunnyvale, Calif.): ASIC design and manufacturing services

Inphi Corp. (Sunnyvale, Calif.): high-speed analog

Peregrine Semiconductor Corp. (San Diego, Calif.): silicon-on-sapphire manufacturer

SiGe Semiconductor Corp. (Andover, Mass. ): silicon-germanium manufacturer

ViXS Systems Inc. (Toronto, Ontario, Canada): video processing and wireless company

Apache Design Solutions Inc. (San Jose, Calif.): a vendor of power and noise analysis EDA software

Elonics Ltd. (Livingston, Scotland): CMOS RF tuner specialist

Icera Inc. (Bristol, England): soft modem IC company

Picochip Designs Ltd. (Bath, England) vendor of parallel processing chip for LTE and femto cell basebands