San Diego Fabless Startup Gets $6M to Pursue Smart-Grid Chip

Bruce V. Bigelow6/16/10Leave a CommentFollow @bvbigelow

San Diego has a new semiconductor startup, courtesy of venture funding from the Bay Area. San Diego-based Pervasive, a fabless semiconductor design company that is focused on smart grid applications, raised $6 million from investors, according to a recent filing with securities regulators.

The startup’s founding president and CEO is Reza Mirkhani, a former director of marketing for RF tuners at San Diego-based Entropic Communications. He was previously an executive vice president of marketing for a company called Integrated RF Devices, and a senior marketing manager at Fremont, CA-based Centillium Communications, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Mirkhani’s profile also describes Pervasive as a fabless semiconductor company with 22 employees that is focused on designing and developing system-on-a-chip solutions for the smart grid market.

Pervasive’s filing with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission does not identify investors, but it lists Rohini Chakravarthy, a partner in the Menlo Park, CA, office of New Enterprise Associates, and Lip-Bu Tan, founder and chairman of Walden International, a San Francisco-based venture investor.

The filing also identifies Shahin Hedayat, the co-founder and former president and chief technical officer of Centillium Communications, as a Pervasive director. Centillium was acquired in July 2008 by Shelton, CT-based TranSwitch (NASDAQ: TXCC) in a deal valued at nearly $43 million.

Hedayat is now chairman of Santa Clara, CA-based Beceem Communications.

Bruce V. Bigelow is the editor of Xconomy San Diego. You can e-mail him at bbigelow@xconomy.com or call (619) 669-8788