The closure is a blow to one of the bigger efforts to push parallel processing, which uses many different processing cores, or brains, on a single chip. However, rivals such as Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel have all adopted some of the parallel processing techniques that Stream Processors had talked about producing.

Jack Horng, an officer for the company, said that Stream Processors (see VB profile of the company) will be formally shut in a month or so. The former chief executive, Chip Stearns, is forming a new company to acquire all of the assets from Stream Processors, so it’s possible its technology will live on. The new company is expected to continue to supply its current generation Storm-1 processors but it isn’t clear what will happen with the Storm-2 second-generation chips.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company was founded in 2004 by  Bill Dally, dean of the computer science department at Stanford University. Dally left Stanford in January to become chief scientist at graphics chip maker Nvidia. The company churned out its first chip samples in 2006 and began shipping its Storm-1 series chips in 2007.

Attempts to reach the company were unsuccessful.  The company focused on making video surveillance and high-end consumer electronics chips. Rivals include chip makers such as Stretch and Texas Instruments. Stream Processors had funding from Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and Woodside Fund.

The recession has not been kind to chip startups. Few chip makers are getting funding these days, since it can take tens of millions of dollars to fund a new chip company.

Carlsbad, Calif.-based MaxLinear makes analog or mixed-signal radio chips that can be manufactured in standard chip factories. The chips enable devices to display broadband video. The chips are used in a wide array of electronic gear: cable and terrestrial set-top boxes, digital TVs, cell phones, PCs, netbooks and car entertainment systems. The company has more than 35 customers, including Panasonic, Murata, Alps Electric and Sony.

MaxLinear was founded in 2003. Since shipping its first products in 2006, the company has shipped more than 65 million radio chips. For the nine months ended Sept. 30, revenues were $36.1 million, up from $23.6 million a year earlier. Net income was $2.4 million for the period, compared to a loss of $1.1 million a year earlier.

The market for radio frequency, digital signal processors and analog chips used in set-top boxes, mobile phones, autos and TVs was $7.6 billion, according to market researcher iSuppli.

Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank Securities are handling the offering. Co-managers include UBS Securities, Thomas Weisel Partners and Needham & Co. It’s good to see a chip company filing to go public. It often takes so much investment these days that chip makers have a hard time finding venture capital funding.

NXP Semiconductors, a chip maker that spun out of Philips in 2006, showed off prototypes for these cool applications at its headquarters in San Jose, Calif., yesterday. Based on the working products and prototypes there, it’s clear we’re headed for a wonderful world of wireless sensors.

Pictured above is a smart Band-Aid, which has sensors that can detect whether a wound is bleeding or is getting infected. It can also send out a signal notifying a caregiver when it’s time for a bandage change. The bandage prototype from Urgo Laboratories uses a sensor chip to detect humidity and pressure. It also has a self-powered stretchable antenna to communicate wirelessly to a caregiver. NXP can package a digital signal processor with it to process data from the sensor.

NXP also makes magnetic induction radios (left) that consume a very small amount of power. These can be used in hearing aids (right) that can wirelessly communicate with each other, from ear to ear. The benefit is improved sound quality and a better ability to discern the direction a sound is coming from.

Sensor chips and other analog and “mixed signal” devices — which capture data from the real world and process it into computer form — are going through their own revolution now as miniaturization advances and costs drop, says Mike Noonen, senior vice president of marketing at NXP, which makes chips for 13 different markets from consumer digital devices to smart sensors.

Another cool application is the “smart bottle.” The company showed off how a second-generation radio frequency identification (RFID) tag embedded into the plastic bottom of a pill bottle can identify whether the pills are authentic, counterfeit, or expired.

And here’s a new business model for cars: What if you could get a car for free, and pay only for usage? OK, that’s my idea, not theirs. But yo can see how this kind of nutty business idea might make sense, if you get people to pay for usage rather than make a big upfront purchase. NXP’s Automotive Telematics on-board unit Platform (ATOP) is kind of like Lojack, OnStar, and Fast Pass all combined into one system on a chip for your car.

ATOP can use the wireless phone network and the global positioning system (GPS) navigation to locate your car and figure out which toll roads you’re traveling on. It can automatically deduct the toll from your FastPass-like account as you pass by toll locations. The good thing is there is no need to have toll booths or sensors in the roads, since the GPS location app will determine when and where to deduct tolls. And if you need roadside emergency service or your car is stolen, it’s easy to fix the location of the vehicle with ATOP.

NXP’s working to improve power efficiency in lighting, too. The company makes drivers for light-emitting diodes, the colorful LED lights that illuminate everything from TVs to laptops. It has made progress in creating drivers for white-light LEDs that can be precisely dimmed or brightened without flickering. The LEDs can also be used to drive lots of power-efficient lights in densely-packed devices like this Japanese Pachinko machine. How’s that for progress? LEDs save a lot of energy usage — as much as five times more efficient than incandescent bulbs — so that we can just use a lot more of them to light up the world.

NXP makes 26,000 different chips. And it has 6,000 research and development engineers and an R&D budget of $175 million per quarter. So you can expect a lot more of this in the future.

Worldwide chip sales are expected to be $219.7 billion this year, down from $248.6 billion in 2008. But sales are forecast to grow 10.2 percent in 2010 and by another 8.4 percent to $262.3 billion in 2011, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

In June, the SIA expected chip sales to fall 21 percent. But the industry has been improving every month as the recession isn’t as severe as previously thought. By comparison, market researcher Gartner believes chip sales will fall 17 percent in 2009 and rise 10 percent in 2010, while market researcher iSuppli believes sales will drop 16.5 percent in 2009.

“The new forecast is brighter than our earlier projections, reflecting an improving global economy,” said SIA president George Scalise in a statement. “Unit sales of key demand drivers – including PCs and cell phones, which together account for about 60 percent of semiconductor demand – have been stronger than previously predicted. We remain cautiously optimistic for the longer term. The current forecast is closely tied to projections of continuing improvement in the worldwide economy.”

The lawsuit echoes allegations made by the European Union, which in May levied a $1.45 billion fine against Intel for setting up deals with PC makers and retailers that excluded its main competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, from getting market access. Such actions happen all the time, but companies with monopoly power aren’t allowed to throw their weight around like this under antitrust laws.

“Intel has engaged in a systematic worldwide campaign of illegal, exclusionary
conduct to maintain its monopoly power and prices in the market for x86 microprocessors, the
‘brains’ of PCs,” the lawsuit by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo says. “By exacting exclusive or near-exclusive agreements from large computer makers, in exchange for payments totaling billions of dollars, and threatening retaliation against any company that did not heed its wishes, Intel robbed its competitors of the opportunity to challenge Intel’s dominance in key segments of the market. This illegal behavior was highly detrimental to consumers, competition, and innovation.”

The suit was filed in federal court in Delaware. A lot of the allegations mirror the evidence released by the EU in September. Intel has denied wrongdoing in the EU case and is appealing. It argues that it gives incentives that leave PC makers with plenty of choice and that its actions have led to constantly falling prices for consumers. AMD argues that Intel is essentially paying customers not to use AMD, which has about a fifth of the PC microprocessor market.

In a statement, AMD executive vice president Tom McCoy said, “The New York Attorney General’s 83-page complaint details explicit evidence of Intel’s harm to U.S. consumers and computer manufacturers. Stopping that illegal harm will serve the settled purpose of the American antitrust laws: ensuring that innovation is unconstrained and competition is free to serve consumers.”

Intel hasn’t commented yet. The New York lawsuit is filed on behalf of New York consumers. It is one more headache for Intel, which faces a Federal Trade Commission investigation as well a big private antitrust lawsuit from AMD.

[Update: Tom Beermann, an Intel spokesman, said, "We disagree with the decision to file suit in the matter. This covers the same ground we have been dealing with in the private litigation with AMD since 2005. Since that time, both companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and given 2,200 hours of depositions in that matter. It raises the question that, when that trial is set to begin in six months, why now? Neither consumers, who have benefited from innovation and low prices, nor justice are being served by the decision to file a case now."

He added, "Much of it does appear to cover the same territory and same tired arguments that AMD has been putting forth for the past 4.5 years."]

The company says it is trying to improve on established neuroscience technology called “EEG (Electroencephalography) recording” by offering a better way to tell marketing directors and video game developers which parts of commercials or video games people don’t like. The company gets this data by paying people to be guinea pigs — to wear its EEG-sensing headsets and watch TV or play video games. Emsense then measures their brainwaves and other physiological reactions.

Technology Partners led the round, and was joined by existing investor the Foundry Group.

The company said the funding will help it support its market research partners as well as help it develop a large bio-sensory “in-home panel” — the first of its kind.

“We believe that neuromarketing is now mainstream and is poised for explosive growth,” said Roger Quy, general partner with Technology Partners, in a statement. He pointed out that he is one of the only venture capitalists with a PhD in neuroscience and a research background in neurotechnology.

There are other companies trying to do something similar. Neurofocus of Berkeley is one.

The New York company developed MongoDB, an open source database for web applications that’s being used by open source repository SourceForge, commenting startup Disqus, and New York tech news site Business Insider. Companies can run MongoDB on their own servers or using online infrastructure offered by cloud computing providers.

The new round was led by Flybridge Capital Partners with participation from previous investor Union Square Ventures. When 10gen raised its $1.5 million first round last year, it sounded like a more general cloud platform company.

Chip maker Marvell is announcing today that it has created a new ARM-based microprocessor tailored for the eBook market. Together, with Marvell’s other components, the new chip can be used in more functional eBooks with six-inch screens that could eventually cost under $100. Amazon’s original Kindle eBook reader, the most popular one on the market, costs $259.

Jack Kang, director of technical marketing at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Marvell, said in an interview that the chip maker has integrated the E Ink electronic paper technology into a specific new member of its Armada microprocessor family. No longer is it necessary to have a separate and costly e-paper subsystem. By doing so, Marvell has been able to cut about 15 percent of the costs of an eBook system.

Kang said that the newer eBook readers based on the technology will be able to turn pages instantaneously in less than a second, compared to a second or more for current eBook readers. The chip will also support eBook readers with screens larger than 9.7 inches.

“The goal is to get the technology into mass adoption,” Kang said.

These new eBooks will be available in the first quarter of 2010. They won’t initially be priced at under $100, but they are expected to get there eventually. Marvell announced its Armada family of processors earlier this month. It worked on the processors, which are based on the Intel Xscale technology that it bought in 2006, for almost four years. This new eBook chip, the Armada 166E, runs at more than a gigahertz and is based on the Armada 100 series chip designs.

The chips are based on the ARM microprocessor designs, which are shipping in 600 million Marvell-based chips each year. But while others rely upon core technology from ARM, Marvell designs the cores — or processor brains — that it uses itself.

Rivals in the market for eBook chips include Freescale, Texas Instruments, and Samsung. The original Amazon Kindle uses a Marvell chip, but the newer Kindle uses a Freescale chip.

Marvell said customers for its chip will announce their products at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Some of the devices will have two displays, including a color screen that can be used to browse through electronic bookstores. They will also have the ability to download eBooks via wireless data connections such as Wi-Fi or 3G networks. The devices may also use Google’s Android operating system.

One of the customers for the new chip is Entourage, which will use the Marvell device in its upcoming Edge eBook reader. Another Marvell customer is Plastic Logic, which is launching its Que eBook reader in the first quarter.

Intel Capital president Arvind Sodhani told peHUB writer Deborah Gage that he expects more such companies in Intel’s Chinese p0rtf0lio. Going public in America, he said, is simply too expensive.

Both Hoffman and Greylock partner David Sze said Hoffman’s new position at Greylock shouldn’t affect his work at LinkedIn — after all, Jeff Weiner took over as CEO in June, with Hoffman scaling back his role to chairman. Hoffman has also been a prolific angel investor during the last few years (he said he made 85 investments in the last six years), having backed Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Zynga, and others.

“I definitely wear too many hats,” Hoffman said. “[Greylock and I] both wanted to make sure we had good, aligned interests. My interest was that I would continue to be massively focused on LinkedIn, and their interest was that I would help provide intelligence on the consumer Internet.”

More concretely, Hoffman said he plans to maintain the same level of involvement in LinkedIn, while shifting the time he spends on angel investing to Greylock. Sze pointed to Greylock partner Aneel Bhusri, who also serves as co-CEO at Workday, as a demonstration that these time-splitting arrangements can work.

As for the new fund, Sze said Greylock has been raising its money from the same partners for several decades, so it didn’t have much trouble signing them up for the current fund — the process only took about four to six weeks, and Greylock XIII is about the same size as Greylock’s past funds. Despite the general decline in money raised by venture funds, Sze said the top-tier VCs are still able to get the money they need. It’s the less-established VCs that are having trouble.

“We’re seeing a flight to quality at all levels — for LPs, VCs, and entrepreneurs,” he said.

As for how Greylock plans to invest the new money, Sze said the firm will continue the path it has been following for the past few years — it will remain focused on early-stage investments, but will also branch out into later-stage deals, if the company is particularly promising.

Greylock’s portfolio currently includes Digg, Facebook, Cloudera, and oh yeah, LinkedIn.

Scoopler, which scours Twitter, Digg and Delicious as their content is updated, first received funding last year from Y Combinator.

The company previously took funding from STPV Holdings.