U.K. startup receives $28 million for push into mobile TV

LONDON — Frontier Silicon Ltd., a fabless chip company that has produced digital audio broadcast and digital terrestrial television receiver chips, has closed a $28 million venture capital investment round, one of the largest ever secured by a U.K. based chip company.

The money is set to be used to develop a position in mobile digital television, and further develop Frontier's digital radio products, the company said. Frontier claims to have 70 percent of the market for DAB digital radio receiver chips.

ACT Venture Capital is a new investor and led the latest round supported by existing investors including funds advised by Apax Partners, Alta Berkeley and BlueRun Ventures, formerly known as Nokia Venture Partners, and new investor Quilvest.

"This latest investment allows us to aggressively target and drive market share in the emerging mobile digital television market in the same way that we have established our chips in over 70 percent of DAB digital radios. Our launch this month of a mobile digital television chip set has been well received by key mobile handset manufacturers," said Anthony Sethill, chief executive officer and founder of Frontier Silicon, in a statement. "This new funding will be used to expand existing and open new design centres for our future mobile digital television IC and software products. We will continue to focus on technologies targeted at the digital radio and television markets, both for the home and mobile broadcast sectors," he added.

Watford-based Frontier Silicon was founded in 2001 based on technology licensed from fellow U.K. company Imagination Technologies Group plc, (see Dec. 16, 2002, story). The company was re-organized in Nov. 2003 with an influx of executives who had previously been with ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England).

Martin Jackson, formerly chief technology officer of GlobespanVirata Inc. joined as chief technology officer and Steve Evans, formerly vice president of marketing at ARM joined as vice president of sales. These changes come on top of recent changes to the board of directors that accompanied capital investment. Pete Magowan, formerly vice president of sales and marketing at ARM who became a partner with venture capital company Alta Berkeley, and Jonathan Brooks, formally chief financial officer of ARM, joined Frontier's board of directors.

Nokia Venture Partners, now known as BlueRun Ventures, invested an undisclosed amount in Frontier, thought to have been several millions of dollars, in May 2004.

In the last month Frontier Silicon launched two chips for receiving terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (T-DMB) services on mobile phone handsets; the Apollo chip receives broadcast signals while the Kino chip provides the digital baseband processing.

Sethill said about the launch, "The convergence of mobile communications and broadcasting is happening now, and I believe the addition of low power TV tuners to mobile handsets will enable the next killer application for mobile phones, opening up significant new revenue opportunities for content providers and network operators. Frontier Silicon's objective is to be one of the key chip suppliers to this new market sector."