If the toxic peak-to-average power ratios (PAPRs) that result from high-data-rate modulation in relatively narrow bandwidths have ever given you a hangover, then IceFyre Semiconductor might have the cure. Founded in February 2001 by Jung Yee, Jim Wight, Doug Sanderson, Tyler Burns and Cedric Paillard, the company's solution relies on innovative digital, mixed-signal and analog circuit-design techniques to eliminate PAPRs and increase efficiency and performance. To date, the company cites up to a 75 percent efficiency improvement, along with a 2x improvement in RF output power.

Though initially targeting the exploding 802.11a and 802.11a/b/g wireless-LAN markets that use orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), many advanced modulation schemes stand to benefit, including W-CDMA, 4G and last-mile wireless.

Performance is important, since the company is going up against incumbents such as Texas Instruments, Atheros, GlobeSpanVirata and Broadcom. But IceFyre's case has been convincing enough to get $39 million from investors. The privately held company employs 55 and expects to grow to 60 by year's end.

Location: Ottawa
Founded: February 2001
URL: www.icefyre.com
Financing: $39 million
Main Products: SureFyre 802.11a and TwinFyre 802.11a/b/g solutions

To view a photo of IceFyre accepting the Comet Award, click here

iReady was founded in 1996 by Ryo Koyama, John Minami and Mike Johnson, with a vision of supplying hardware-based TCP/IP acceleration for the growing packet-based communications market. To do so, the team relied upon a deep pool of TCP processing-domain expertise, a fundamental patent position and a highly scalable architecture to give it a leg up in the emerging iSCSI and high-speed Ethernet interconnect market segments.

In 2003, the company launched a line of TCP/IP acceleration products for the networked storage market, and in the past year its market profile has risen with the introduction of its first dedicated hardware products. On the host bus adapter side, iReady has introduced an iSCSI storage adapter for both wired and optical networks. It also offers a full range of initiator and target iSCSI software.

With its first dedicated iSCSI products shipping, iReady expects its current employee base of 60 to increase by 10 percent by the end of 2003.

Location: Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters; Honolulu, IC design center
Founded: January 1996
URL: www.iready.com
Financing: $60 million
Main Products: EthernetMAX iSCSI controller, IR-1011 family of host bus adapters

To view a photo of iReady accepting the Comet Award, click here

When you've had almost a decade of experience designing the asynchronous-transfer-mode systems of Fore Systems Inc. and Marconi Communications, what do you do for an encore? In the post-ATM fall of 1999, six Fore veterans-Atul Bansal, Stephen Vogelsang, Robert Warden, Robert Rennison, Dimitris Varotsis and Jeffrey Prem-decided the answer resided in next-generation IP routing, particularly routing making use of the new Multi-Protocol Label Switching standards.

While core-router markets for the transport core already were getting crowded by 1999, the founders assumed that intelligence would migrate to the edge of the public network by the early 21st century, necessitating a more performance-oriented router-handling traffic at the network edge-for regional Bell and alternative local-exchange customers. That the two most powerful router players at the network edge were Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks did not frighten the sales and marketing team assembled at Laurel.

In 2001, a service edge router was introduced, optimized for IP traffic shaped with multiprotocol label-switching constraints. The AnyService on AnyPort@AnySpeed feature of the hardware allows traffic to be defined for Sonet/SDH and Gigabit Ethernet.

Since the hardware debut, Laurel also has released the Laurel Provisioning System (LPS), a full network management and provisioning software suite.

Location: Pittsburgh
Founded: October 1999
URL: www.laurelnetworks.com
Financing: Nearly $90 million
Main Products: ST200 service edge router, Laurel Provisioning System software

To view a photo of Laurel Networks accepting the Comet Award, click here

NeoMagic Corp. is a veteran among the Comet honorees, having been founded in July 1993 by Prakash Agarwal. The company originally provided chip solutions for notebook PC multimedia accelerators until mid-2000, when it left that market to focus on application processors for handheld systems.

NeoMagic concentrates on multimedia processors-tied to the ARM RISC core-that target low-power apps such as PDAs and multimedia cell phones. As such, it competes with such DSP and RISC players as Texas Instruments and Intel. While it posted a net loss of $9.4 million, on net sales of $2.2 million, for the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, the company had $67 million in cash at the end of fiscal 2003 and had a market capitalization of $63.6 million as of July. NeoMagic counts Toshiba, DejaView and NeoNode among its customers.

Partnerships are many, and they include Analog Devices, for baseband companion processors, and Microsoft, Symbian and others, for software environments. NeoMagic does see greater market opportunities in Europe and Asia than in North America.

Location: Santa Clara, Calif.
Founded: July 1993
URL: www.neomagic.com
Financing: Public company, with more than $50 million cash on hand and market cap of $63.6 million
Main Products: MiMagic 3, MiMagic 5 and MiMagic 6 (with Associative Processor Array [APA])

To view a photo of NeoMagic accepting the Comet Award, click here

Before founding Neoteris in May 2000, its founders-Sam Srinivas, Theron Tock, Surya Koneru and Shyam Davuluru-discussed the plethora of gateway and Radius server specialists clamoring for attention. If they were to start a company, they needed to develop an angle-quickly. Not long after founding the company, the group defined the company's Access Service platforms and Meeting Series enterprise platforms, reducing the cost of enterprisewide meetings through SSL. Both architectures were based on what Neoteris called the Instant Virtual Extranet architecture.

The first of the IVE platforms shipped in November 2001. Though Neoteris goes directly against offerings from broad-based virtual private network suppliers, such as Nortel Networks Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., over the past seven quarters its quarter-to-quarter growth rate has been 85 percent. The customer base exceeded 400 by September, and Neoteris expects to have 200 employees by year's end. More than 100 channel partners have played a key role.

Location: Sunnyvale, Calif.
Founded: May 2000
URL: www.neoteris.com
Financing: $37.5 million after three rounds
Main Products: Instant Virtual Extranet architecture gateways and servers, including the Access Service line, the Meeting Series and a new wireless product line, which will debut in late 2003

To view a photo of Neoteris accepting the Comet Award, click here

No one ever said 3G wireless would be easy. But in October 2000, when Pete Claydon and Doug Pulley founded picoChip Designs Ltd. (Bath, England), they didn't see difficulty. They saw opportunity. The pair set a goal of becoming the top-ranked supplier of solutions for complex, leading-edge communications systems such as 3G wireless, as well as WiMAX, 802.20 and 4G next-generation wireless infrastructure.

To that end, the fledgling company worked on and developed the picoArray, a massively parallel array of heterogeneous processors that performs up to 30-gigamultiply-accumulates per second. But architectural innovation alone is not the answer. Aware of that, picoChip has implemented its architecture in such a way as to allow engineers to use familiar programming languages (ANSI C) and existing code, while also including the tool chain and reference-design support that engineers need to quickly realize their designs.

Up against the likes of Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Motorola and Xilinx, picoChip has a tough road ahead of it, but Claydon and Pulley are confident and with customer announcements imminent the company plans to go from 42 employees to 50 by year's end.

Location: Bath, England
Founded: October 2000
URL: www.picochip.com
Financing: $7 million, plus undisclosed summer '03 round
Main Products: PC101 architecture, tool chain and reference design

To view a photo of picoChip accepting the Comet Award, click here

In 1996, Nav Sooch, Dave Welland and Jeff Scott took their collective expertise in mixed-signal design and CMOS process technology and set up Silicon Laboratories. Their mission? To leverage innovations in CMOS to clean up the average wireless, optical and wireline pc board by converting the many disparate analog and RF components into highly integrated, high-performance, highly differentiated single-chip CMOS devices covering a range of applications.

The zenith of their work is an all-CMOS GSM/GPRS transceiver family, the latest generation of which requires only 15 components for an RF front end (excluding the switch and power amp), compared with as many as 60 components in competing solutions. While the transceiver line is proving successful, the company owes much of its earlier success to its silicon direct-access arrangements (DAAs) for PC modems and embedded modems for set-top boxes, point-of-sale terminals and ATM terminals.

Despite facing off against the likes of Skyworks, Hitachi, Infineon, Conexant, ADI, AMCC and PMC-Sierra, the company delivered its eighth consecutive quarter of sequential revenue growth in the first three months of 2003 by reporting $63.8 million in revenue. It expects to grow from 415 employees to a healthy 450 this year.

Location: Austin, Texas
Founded: August 1996
URL: www.silabs.com
Financing: Early investment capital, IPO in March 2000 and Nasdaq: SLAB
Main Products: Aero GSM/GPRS transceiver, RF synthesizers, DAAs, ISOmodem embedded modems, ProSLIC line of subscriber line interface circuits, ADSL front ends and SiPHY physical-layer ICs and precision clocking ICs

To view a photo of Silicon Laboratories accepting the Comet Award, click here

Though excited by the potential of wireless LANs, Bill Miskovetz, Dan Simone and Ward Harriman also saw the difficulty of deploying the technology on a large scale-both cost-effectively and securely. Consequently, the trio got together in March 2002 to form Trapeze Networks Inc. to tackle three issues: the seamless integration of wired and wireless networks, pre- and post-deployment planning and management tools, and secure user mobility.

While Trapeze cites incumbent Cisco Systems as its top competitor, that may give short shrift to the glut of other WLAN switch vendors that have emerged during the past year to vie for a slice of the pie. It's going to be just as tough to be heard above all these startups as it will be to oust Cisco, but Trapeze has not been known for being quiet.

With dozens of customers to date, the management team of the privately held company has been convincing, having already raised $50 million. It employs 115 people worldwide.

Location: Pleasanton, Calif.
Founded: March 2002
URL: www.trapezenetworks.com
Financing: $50 million
Main Products: Mobility System, which includes the Mobility Exchange, Mobility Point, Mobility System Software, RingMaster tool suite

To view a photo of Trapeze accepting the Comet Award, click here

Fully aware of just how crowded the WLAN market is, Vivato founders Skip Crilly, Bob Conley and Jim Brennan believed an ambitious, highly sophisticated phased-array antenna 2.45-GHz Wi-Fi switch would be the flanking maneuver they needed. To that end, the three formed Mabuhay Networks in December 2000 and adopted the name Vivato when it broke cover in November 2002.

Vivato's tagline is "Wi-Fi everywhere," from homes to offices to hotspots. Its first products, an indoor 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi switch and an outdoor 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi switch, have changed the physics of Wi-Fi by extending its range from 300 feet to as much as 7 kilometers, while still interoperating with standard Wi-Fi clients.

Indoors, the company faces competition from Cisco and an army of WLAN switching vendors, including Trapeze. Outdoors, however, the closest competition comes from fixed wireless access. It currently employs 150 people.

Location: San Francisco; Spokane, Wash.
Founded: December 2000
URL: www.vivato.net
Financing: $67 million
Main Products: Indoor 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi Switch and Outdoor 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi Switch; 2.4-GHz Bridge/Rouer that fills in coverage holes, extends range or provides backhaul

To view a photo of Vivato accepting the Comet Award, click here