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ICMask Design to invest €450,000 in R&D initiative
13 December 2009 By Dick O’Brien
Chip design services firm IC Mask Design is to invest €450,000 in a new research and development (R&D) initiative backed by Enterprise Ireland.
Chief executive Fergal Brosnan said that the state agency had provided approximately 45 per cent of the funding, with the balance coming from the company’s own reserves. IC Mask Design specialises in providing services to chip design companies. The new R&D initiative will see it develop a software package that will help automate some of those services.
Brosnan said that a successful development of such a product would mean that the firm’s focus would move from being a services firm towards software development. However, he did not believe that the services element would disappear completely.
‘‘The reasoning behind it is to try and get some massive acceleration and semi-automation of the process," he said.
‘‘The idea will be that this tool will be generally available in the marketplace and we will use it ourselves internally to provide a better or faster service."
The Limerick-based company was founded by Brosnan, formerly of ParthusCeva, and business partner Ciaran Whyte in 2002. Since then the company has grown to the stage where it has 90 customers in the chip design industry. Brosnan said that the firm had two main types of customers, large multinationals and smaller, fabless chip developers. Confidentiality clauses in contracts prohibited him from naming some of the firm’s biggest customers, but he said that the client base did include Dublin based Movidius and British firm Cambridge Silicon Radio.
The company employs ten people, which is down from a high of 18, but Brosnan said that this number was likely to increase by six or seven over the next year as a result of the new investment. Trading conditions had tightened due to the global economic crisis.
‘‘There has easily been a 40 per cent decrease in sales revenues in the past 12 months," he said. ‘‘People are cancelling projects. It is the repeat customer base that is keeping us going. It has been very difficult to win new business."
The company, which files abridged accounts, does not disclose turnover figures.
However Brosnan said that it had been profit-making from day one and had grown organically from the seed investment made by its founders. The most recent accounts indicate that it made a net profit of €150,000 last year and had accumulated profits of €598,000.
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