Chip vendor lands $15 million

DSL chip vendor Ikanos Communications today is announcing that it has landed an additional $15 million in Series E funding.

The round, led by Copan and including PMC-Sierra, Greylock Partners, Intel Capital, JP Morgan, Ridgewood Capital, Sequoia Capital, Telesoft Partners, TL Ventures, Walden International and VentureTech Alliance, is expected to be the last private funding for the vendor that has cut its teeth on providing VDSL chips to the early Asian markets. According to Richard Sekar, vice president of marketing for Ikanos, the company expects to reach profitability in the second half of this year.

Ikanos, which claims to have shipped two million ports of DSL chipset since the fourth quarter of 2002, is expected to rely heavily on partnerships as it moves into new markets, he added. Copan, which has offices in Munich, London and Palo Alto, is expected provide some links to carriers in Europe, a market that is rapidly adopting broadband.

"Up to now we’ve been shipping mostly to Asia, but now we’re starting to see a lot of traction in Europe," Sekar said. "The driving factor in Europe is triple play and competition coming from both the cable operators as well as the new emerging players like FastWeb."

The U.S. market, which has not adopted VDSL to any great extent, will likely end up using the technology to extend Ethernet services to enterprise users not connected directly to fiber.