Former key executives of Chipcon have joined forces to create Energy Micro AS, a new Norwegian chip company, the stated aim of which is to create the industry’s most energy friendly microcontrollers based on modern and powerful microprocessor architectures. The company has already received financial support from Innovation Norway and will seek to establish further financial support through other Norwegian Institutions. The founders and early employees will invest a total of $1.5 M in start-up capital.

Geir Førre, president and CEO of Energy Micro, was previously co-founder and CEO of Chipcon, a successful semiconductor company focusing on low power RF products. Chipcon was acquired by Texas Instruments for $200 M in January 2006. Øyvind Janbu, CTO of Energy Micro, was one of the early employees at Chipcon and held several key technical positions within the company. During the next few months the new company will establish a start-up team of ten people and will be fully operational on 1 January 2008.

Førre said, “We aim to fund the company development ourselves during the first two years of operations. Thereafter we will invite external investors to participate in Energy Micro. All new employees will also be offered stocks in the company, at a level that really matters. Our ten year goal is to establish over a one percent market share in a market that today is worth more than $15 B and growing more than five percent per year.”

Energy Micro will produce EnergetIC™ microcontrollers with a combination of extremely low power consumption and high analog and digital integration for applications where battery lifetime, performance and analog integration is important. The company will release the first series of EnergetIC microcontrollers in the second quarter 2009. The company will offer a broad application range mixed-signal microcontroller family, microcontrollers targeting specific vertical applications and customer-defined solutions with embedded intellectual property.