BlackRock and Janus Henderson have committed to take $510 million worth of shares at an equity valuation of up to $4.5 billion.
Alphawave plans to sell at least a quarter of its shares at the IPO.
CEO and founder Tony Pialis (pictured), who previously founded Snowbush Microelectronics and V Semiconductor, says that, in founding Alphawave, he envisaged that ““an architectural revolution would be needed that moved SerDes away from traditional analogue approaches, towards novel digital and DSP based architectures.”
“DSP approaches are especially well suited and leverages technology scaling much more than traditional analogue SerDes architectures,” says Pialis, “foundries appreciate this and are embracing our technology and approaches.”
The total design IP revenue was worth $4.6 billion in 2020, according to IPNest, and the total interface design IP market was worth $870 million in 2019 and forecast to reach $1.8 billion by 2025.
IPNest says that Alphawave is “rumoured to have had $75 million in orders in 2020, thanks to their positioning targeting the most advanced rates and application of the high-end segment of PCIe and Ethernet. In this portion of the market, they enjoyed 28% market share in 2019 and 36% in 2020. If Alphawave can keep their advance on the high-end SerDes market, it’s not unrealistic to foresee $300-400 million in IP revenues by 2024-2025.”
Alphawave’s IP supports data rates from 1Gbps to 112Gbps and will soon go to 224Gbps. Multiple signalling schemes are supported, such as pulse amplitude modulations (PAM2 (aka NRZ), PAM4, PAM6 and PAM8), which are used in over 30 different industry protocols/standards.
Products are:
- DieCORE XSR MSS
- PipeCORE PCI-Express and CXL PHY
- ApolloCORE MR/VSR MSS
- AlphaCORE LR MSS
- ZeusCORE XLR MSS
The AlphaCORE100 made on TSMC’s 6nm process is a multi-standard DSP PHY, that supports the leading 100G Ethernet, PCIe, CXL and Base Station standards.
After the IPO Alphawave intends to set up its HQ in the UK.