CamSemi started at the beginning of this decade when two world-renowned Cambridge University electrical engineering staff members had a vision for a novel way to implement very high voltage switches in silicon. And just to quantify that, for us high voltage is of the order of 700 volts, not a few tens of volts. This novel approach is now widely publicised and patent-protected idea and involves what we call “back etching” underneath the high voltage device. So instead of just processing the front side of the wafer, this approach requires you to also etch the conducted silicon material underneath the high voltage device. By doing so you allow the electrical field to kind of relax into that air dielectric underneath and that allowed us to take break down voltages on a bipolar structure from 30 to over 600 volts.

So it’s one of those things that when you look back at it you think, gosh that’s obvious!

But it brought together thinking from the MEMS sensor industry and from the high voltage power electronics industry and Professor Gehan Amaratunga and Dr Florin Udrea both had prior experiences in those areas.

So they took the fundamental idea, secured some early seed funding and were able to prove the concept. All of which led to the first A-round closure towards the end of 2002. So that’s when the business really got off the ground with significant investment driving it forward; at that point about £3.5 million pounds of funding. That was a massive achievement in 2002, which was a particularly difficult year for any technology business trying to attract investment.

To get backing from 3i, Scottish Equity Partners and TTP Ventures was a real achievement. The company at that point was around five people and then grew over time. I joined in January 2004, by which stage the business was showing silicon that combined this high voltage device with sophisticated control electronics for the chosen target application: off-line power conversion.

Off-line means the energy is coming from the mains voltage line. So it’s all about converting power from the high voltage mains, and then down converting and regulating that for the use in pretty much any electronic or electrical product you can think of.

Perhaps the highest volume example is in mobile phone chargers. However, energy-efficient lighting is also another massive emerging opportunity for us.

One of the really interesting things about this space is just the sheer size of it. The total market today for off-line power converters is over five billion units a year.

And that’s one of the things that attracted the founders and our investors. What we’ve done since is to evolve the business and, while we remain committed to and continue to invest in that original high voltage technology, we’ve gone to market and created our first product revenues last year from the controller elements of the device. The controller is the part that tells the high voltage switch what to do and when; although ultimately our goal is to combine that sort of intelligence with the high voltage capability that was the first concept for the business.

We closed another $26 million dollars of funding last year; we’re now over 60 people strong and driving forward with significant revenue acceleration. So that’s a quick summary of CamSemi’s evolution.

Well that’s what we are driving towards and one of the things that attracted me to this business is that we are at the heart of the converter. With the presence of extremely high voltages, it’s very unlikely this high voltage conversion will get combined with 60 or 45 nanometre technology because it’s like oil and water; the two just don’t mix. So we have a very well defined space in the power chain of the electronic system. Our first products are a system on a chip with all the control intelligence and the next logical step is to integrate the very high voltage (600 or 700 volt) switch with that intelligent control function.

Gehan sometimes refers to this as very mixed signal because the control, the brain, is mixed signal and there’s an optimal mix of analogue and digital functions. Controlling the system is a real challenge because you’re making decisions based upon millivolt-type measurements but operating in the presence of a switch that’s reaches 700 volts in tens of nanoseconds. So it goes far beyond many of the traditional aspects of mixed signal design, because of that potential coupling effect from very, very large voltage transitions that are taking place pretty fast.

I think, personally, there’s greater opportunity there for all sorts of reasons – particularly as a start up. The scale of investment required to do a Moore’s Law play is significantly larger; it’s over an order of magnitude more expensive to tape out a sub-100 nanometre design, than it is for us to do a design.

So if you just look at it from that perspective it’s massively different. The other aspects that interest me are the market capitalisations and valuations mixed-signal businesses manage to achieve, with decent margins and good revenues that are higher than the traditional digital “Moore’s Law” business. I think a third factor is that we don’t have a software integration cycle to worry about; you know it’s that constant challenge of integrating two activities that can very easily point to each other and say well it’s not working because of the other side of the equation. We don’t have to worry about that and as a result not only are our chip design cycles shorter but, very critically, our customer design-in cycles are incredibly fast too. I mean we would be disappointed if a customer didn’t have a working prototype within days of receiving our part. So they spend far more time in safety testing and sort of EMI testing than they do in actually designing-in our part and of course, we try to make that relatively straightforward for them.

So, one of the main reasons I’m here is that I was attracted by the non-Moore’s Law aspect. And the size of the market opportunity - the fact that it’s product substitution into an existing market, rather than an emerging new application where very, very often in my experience it takes longer for the market to develop than you’d like or you’d planned for it to do so.

So we are taking advantage of a discontinuity that’s being driven by that need.

Have you summed this up for the 5 billion units? With these typical savings, how many power stations would that equate to?

We are working and participating in European Council activity around the standards and the evolution from this sort of energy and efficiency point of view.

It is incredibly exciting. I think it’s so timely it’s amazing, and what we’ve been good at as a business is in understanding the bigger picture trends and being fleet of foot in moving in those directions and offering solutions.

It’s very interesting. I have the good fortune that this is the 3rd pre-public company I have worked for – two in the US and one here and I think the environment has changed in a number of ways. Access to funding has improved in that there is now greater availability within Europe compared to how it was 10 years or more ago. The fear of failure culture has changed somewhat – I think it’s still true to some degree but the recognition that you can’t be an entrepreneur and be successful every time – I mean you just can’t! So, how do you react to that? Do you say, well then I’m not going to try or do you take the American view and say well actually I’m going to learn by trying. And I think that there has been a shift in that regard, which is very, very important. I think the political environment has improved too and things like EMI stock-options and R&D tax credits are critical here. There is also a real political will to create more dynamic smaller companies and to support company growth; approaches which I feel have been quite successful. So, there are many factors. I think there are a large number of people who have gone from this country and have been successful in Silicon Valley or elsewhere. Certainly for me, one of my personal ambitions was to take what I’d learnt in that part of the world and to try to create a successful UK start-up and I think CamSemi is well down the path in that regard.

One of the things to be very careful about with tax credits is that the company can only have one form of what’s called notifiable state aid - in effect, funding from a national government. We have gone down the route of pursuing R&D tax credits and that has been a very significant source of funding for us. In addition to that, where we can within those rules, we’ve accessed specific funding for European research projects, on a limited basis, but particularly in the area of the high voltage development – that has been something we’ve actively pursued.

No. Well we have. Our founders’ international reputations and contacts have been very helpful in this and I believe it’s been very beneficial for all parties. I think we see those as real successes for us.

So, that’s just one aspect. We are actively partnering from the product development process and we partner on the tools side of the business. The arrangement we have provides us with access to design and methodology services and also gives us flexibility on our tools licensing. So as projects move through different phases you may have different needs for different tools. We have an aggregate tool value rather than so many licenses for each regardless of whether you are using them or not.

So the ability to partner with people on the design side as well has been important to us. And then if you think of the other side of the equation, one of the things we set out to do right from the beginning was to say that each of our early platform products needs to have a sponsoring customer, that we take on and enter into what we typically call an early access partnership where they help make sure that we understand the market’s and application’s requirements. And in return they have early access to design information; ICs and support. That is something that we’ve adopted as a philosophy for the business and it’s helped us enormously in getting over that “first adopter” challenge that can be fatal for any start-up. So we’ve certainly pursued partnering very strongly on the supply and demand sides.

That is a challenge. It’s very interesting when you look at the evolution of our customer activity and how we’ve built up our sales channel. We have more application and sales people in Taipei than we do in Cambridge so we’ve always taken a global view. When I think back to when we first engaged with the customer base in 2004, we appointed someone to help us get into the Taiwan market because it was important to us. Most of the leaders in the off-line power system business are in Taiwan and Hong Kong so there’s a tremendous focus there. So our early customer engagement was really all international. And of course that’s challenging, but it is the nature of the market we’re serving. We had the choice of moving the whole company there or trying to service it from here and to build local teams in that territory. I suppose in an ideal world we would have just been able to up-sticks and go out there and make the whole company Far East centric, but in practice the core intellectual property and the core of the team are here in Cambridge. So we’ve tried to find a successful hybrid model of core competence in Cambridge with a marketing and sales support channel wherever it needs to be. Our second international centre is North America. Not continental Europe at this stage because it’s in North America where a lot of the influencers are, where a lot of the brands our customers are selling to are located. So we are seeking to make sure we have that presence as well because it will influence our longer term strategic direction.

Well quite. An important consideration for us is protecting our IP. UK employees tend to have a greater respect for IP, although I think that is changing as other parts of the world are becoming more mature about this and realise the value in IP they themselves create. We’ve put a lot of effort in to filing patents and protecting our core IP.

Part of the philosophy was that you need to plan for success and by so doing greatly increasing your probability of success. What can kill a start up that is fortunate enough to have the right product at the right time, is failing to get it out into the market fast enough. They can still be by-passed by an inferior solution that is just delivered better. So we’ve put a lot of effort and emphasis in very early-on: for example a dedicated VP in the quality and reliability area who has established a methodology, thinking and procedures that allowed us to get through first time qualification for our very first silicon. So our first silicon went into production, and did so very, very quickly. Part of that was that we very careful selected our manufacturing partners, had a great team designing the product but also had thought through exactly what we needed in place for qualification and reliability and were able to slickly execute on that. That applied to ESD and all those other things such as design for testability that can just kill you if you don’t plan for them in advance. Just making sure all those pieces are in place in advance of what I sometimes refer to as a “tsunami of demand”- so we can deal with it when it hits.

That’s clearly our aspiration. As I said, I’ve been fortunate enough to see and be part of two prior US-based companies that have done that. It is absolutely a core target for the team; it is a motivational element for everybody. We’re fortunate to have seen other companies successfully do it, so you know it can be done. And I believe we are in a position now where largely it’s up to us – we’ve got our first product out, we have a very good funding position, the market is there, we just need to make sure that we can deliver - that is what the company is focused on doing.

One other key point that can be a problem with European businesses, is the “Fleetness of foot” they posses, that is the ability to recognise opportunity and equally to recognise problems in your own business and very rapidly adapt to both. To find a way not just to be stuck on your original business plan but to say ‘Hey, where can we get to revenue fastest?’, and drive single-mindedly for that because ultimately it’s about return on investment and time-to-revenues are a very, very critical part of that. So I think that sort of fleetness of foot and embracing change rather than being afraid of it is one of the key success factors and lessons from my past.