Analytics startup ProteanTecs Ltd. on Thursday raised $45 million in funding for its “deep data” platform, which uses specialized circuits and machine learning to help semiconductor makers design better processors.

ProteanTecs was launched in 2017 by a group of chip industry veterans. Chief Executive Officer Shai Cohen and two other members of the founding team were among the original co-founders of Mellanox, the network equipment maker acquired by Nvidia Corp. for $6.9 billion. The startup’s advisory board includes former and current executives from industry players such as Intel Corp.

The company’s analytics platform helps chipmakers find issues in their semiconductor designs to streamline the manufacturing process. The startup claims its technology can reduce costs and shorten the time it takes to bring new products to market.

ProteanTecs finds design issues by embedding tiny “monitoring circuits” inside chips that gather data on a processor’s performance, heat and other operational characteristics. This data is then uploaded to the cloud, where it’s processed by machine learning models to pinpoint potential flaws. The company says its algorithms can examine billions of parameters to identify areas for improvement.

One application for the technology is optimizing a chip’s operating temperatures. Theoretically, transistors based on the same design should have the same heat tolerance, but in practice, certain parts of a chip often end up being more sensitive to heat than others. ProteanTecs says its embedded monitoring circuits enable engineers to pinpoint the parts of a chip that need to run cooler and tweak the blueprints accordingly.  

The startup says its technology can also come handy once the design stage is over and a processor is in mass production. The limitations of semiconductor fabrication equipment mean that chips frequently emerge from the production line with slight variations, variations that in some cases cause technical issues further down the road. According to ProteanTecs, chips featuring monitoring circuits can track their own health and flag potential problems before they turn into a service disruption.

In this way, the startup says, its platform speeds the time-consuming quality assurance stage of semiconductor projects. The extra visibility into chip behavior can also reduce the risk of issues going undetected. The result is, at least in theory, a lower risk that a manufacturer will have to recall products due to a design flaw that escaped notice.

The startup claims its technology is used by “some of the largest” electronics makers in the data center, cloud, artificial intelligence and communications segments. ProteanTecs plans to use the new $45 million in funding to further drive customer adoption.

The capital was provided by Koch Disruptive Technologies, Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management and  unnamed existing investors. According to the startup’s website, Intel’s venture capital arm is one of its previous investors. The company has raised about $97 million to date. 

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