Calxeda, a company develops ARM architecture-based microprocessors for servers,  has announced $55 million in additional funding, one of the largest semiconductor capital deals this year. The company received funding from both existing and new investors, which demonstrates confidence of technology investors in ARM technology for datacenters.

The funding is comprised of investments by Austin Ventures and Vulcan Capital plus additional participation by the firm’s existing investors, which includes ARM itself, Advanced Technology Investment Co. and many others. Calxeda will use the funding to accelerate adoption and innovation in the emerging market for ultra-low power scalable computing. The company now employs over 100 people, with offices in Austin and Silicon Valley and subsidiaries across Asia.

“This significant infusion of capital will accelerate the exciting trajectory we have been on for the past four years. Businesses require a more efficient solution for the web, cloud, and big data.  That is what Calxeda is now delivering and this funding will enable us to go bigger and faster. Performance testing and power measurements conducted by Calxeda and third parties confirm Calxeda’s initial projections: Calxeda delivers as much as a ten-fold improvement in energy efficiency compared to today’s commodity x86-based servers," said Barry Evans, co-founder and chief executive of Calxeda.

Calxeda's first development is EnergyCore ECX-1000-series family of system-on-chips. Calxeda EnergyCore system-on-chip incorporates four ARM Cortex-A9 cores as well as  a supercomputing-class 80-Gigabit fabric switch and an integrated management engine with power optimization software, all on a single piece of silicon. The EnergyCore SoC also includes a full complement of server I/O features and a large 4MB ECC L2 cache, enabling system vendors, Calxeda’s customers, to offer a complete server node that consumes only 5W, including 4GB of ECC memory and a large capacity SSD. The ECX-1000 is mostly an experimental vehicle. Commercial products from Calxeda will utilize more advanced ARM architectures, such as Cortex-A15 and ARMv8.

“In the time since we first met Calxeda, they have executed exceptionally well, and the market has begun to embrace disruptively power-efficient datacenter architectures. Calxeda has also demonstrated solid customer traction across several key end user segments, and we are very excited to join their already impressive investor group,” said Clark Jernigan, venture partner at Austin Ventures.

Calxeda is working closely with Hewlett-Packard to bring ARM to datacenters.

“I am very impressed with the innovative approach and completeness of Calxeda’s vision. Calxeda thinks like a solution company, aligning their technology to solve the bigger challenges.  They aren’t just chip guys,” said Steve Hall, managing director at Vulcan Capital.

Tags: ARM, Calxeda, Cortex, HP