How Kickstarter helped save a chipmaker that puts a supercomputer inside a cell phone

logo_gigaom(GIGAOM): Chip startup Adapteva just raised $3.6 million in Series B funding from Ericsson and Carmel Ventures, but there’s no way it would have gotten funded — or even lasted this long — without a Kickstarter campaign that helped it prove its market and bridge a funding gap between its Series A and B rounds. Adapteva launched in May 2011 with a design (and also the actual chip) for a 64-core accelerator that will sit inside a tablet or smartphone to help offload work from the application processor or graphics engine. The idea was that with this chip you could do more computing on the device as opposed to sending it over a cellular or Wi-Fi network. FULL ARTICLE