You should expect this trend to continue. Semiconductors have become a hideously expensive business, aggravated by fewer fabs and more draconian fab/IP acquisition costs. It's a well known that nobody on Sand Hill road will touch semiconductor startups at all, leading to a stagnant collection of semiconductor companies founded 20+ years ago. There was recently announced a semi-only incubator here in SV[1] because nobody can raise any traditional VC money, although time will tell how many successful exits it will have.
> although time will tell how many successful exits it will have.
And that's exactly the problem. Semiconductors has no exit.
Atheros was probably the last company to go from startup to big hit, and look how long it took them to exit.
Why will a VC throw money at a company that has a 5 year exit, at best, when they can throw a lot less at stupid 20-somethings, flog them like slaves, and sell to Yahooglezonsoft.
There are quite a few people interested in semiconductors on Sand Hill Road (have talked with many of them), but you are right that they are very cautious. Thankfully, you should be hearing about a well known VC funding a semiconductor startup in the near future.
Silicon Catalyst is great, and I look forward to silicon coming back to Silicon Valley.
This is such a shame. I think,well I want to believe there os still a lot of things that can be done in that space, both in ip only dev and processing tech. It would be so nice to see a startup doing startupy thing in that space, either ip core, chemical processing or similar.
[1] http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326501