Design-for-power startup raises $1.5M

The funds will serve to expand the company's product portfolio and enable its commercial deployment in the United States and in Asia.

The round of funding, Docea Power noted, was led by Rhône-Alpes Création, Alps Development Sustainable Investment, Siparex, Octalfa, and private investors.

EDA DesignLine interviewed Ghislain Kaiser, CEO of Docea Power, when the company was finalizing its round of financing so as to establish global presence and accelerate the marketing of new products at the international level.

He commented: "We have made contacts with several US companies, and Japan, Korea will be a target in 2010. In the US, we are thinking about creating a subsidiary. In Japan, however, we will consider selling through a distributor."

He then outlined that the company was already generating revenue. Docea's revenue grew three-fold between 2008 and 2009, and expectations are similar for 2009-2010. Looking a little further ahead, Kaiser said he anticipated revenue to be multiplied by 2 to 2.5 in 2010-2011.

Docea was founded in 2006 by Ghislain Kaiser and his brother, Sylvian Kaiser, CTO. It develops solutions for analyzing and optimizing energy and thermal behaviors while taking into account the consumption-temperature interdependence far upstream in the design cycle where energy gains can reach 70 percent.

The French company's initial product, dubbed Aceplorer (ACE stands for Abstract Concept of Energy), is said to model, simulate and explore all aspects of thermal energy and the architecture of electronic systems whatever their complexity may be. Aceplorer has been adopted by US and European semiconductor manufacturers and is deployed in production, by manufacturers developing integrated circuits for mobile applications.

In a separate announcement, Docea said it will demonstrate Aceplorer 2.0 and AcePowerModeler at the 47th Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Anaheim, from June 13 to 18.

Aceplorer 2.0, Docea claimed, adds project management capabilities to boost productivity and a link to virtual platforms to assess the impact of complex scenarios and embedded software on a system’s power consumption.

The company will also preview AcePowerModeler, a power model generator tool that closes the loop between implementation and architectural modeling by automating the creation of power models from lower level simulation and characterization data.

Indeed, Docea explained that AcePowerModeler automates the generation of power models from power figures and tables extracted from low level descriptions and from measurements. These models can be reused by architects at a higher abstraction level for much faster simulations allowing architectural exploration and optimization with no loss of accuracy.

The startup said AcePowerModeler has already been put out for evaluation with a select set of customers and is expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Early 2010, Docea employed 12 people, and Kaiser said he expected the workforce to reach an objective of 20 people in 2010.