Mordue brings 24 years of sales and customer support experience in the semiconductor industry to Siliconaire (Sunnyvale, Calif.). Prior to joining Siliconaire, he held senior level sales and business development positions in the automatic test equipment (ATE) industry.

Founded in 2005, the company is suddenly gaining traction for good reason. The IC industry still pours billions of dollars annually into R&D. But in recent years, as costs have skyrocketed, chip makers have been outsourcing more of their R&D and related requirements to consortia, silicon foundries and third-party vendors.

One of the latest vendors to see the boom is Siliconaire, which provides third-party ''operational services'' to fabless and other chip makers. The company can help customers throughout the entire IC flow, including everything from design, manufacturing and test. This allows designers to concentrate on their system-level expertise.

The company is not a fabless ASIC vendor or an IC design house, Mordue said. ''We don't own the product itself,'' he said.

Instead, the company has a network of experts that can oversee the design, manufacturing and related functions. In effect, Siliconaire can become a ''virtual operation'' for a fabless design houses or other companies. "We can become the extension of your operations team,'' he said.

The company itself can support various projects, but its main specialty is RF and mixed-signal technologies, he said. Siliconaire will also work with customers to design, implement, and support a scalable IT infrastructure.

In 2007, Siliconaire and Fastrack Design Inc., a provider of advanced custom ASIC design solutions, announced the formation of a partnership that will offer customers a total turnkey service. Fastrack Design offers services focused on high-performance, low power and advanced processes. Fastrack's DesignTrack modular flow delivers guaranteed error-free layout results through a structured approach to chip design, with a commitment to first time silicon success.