Elliptic Semiconductor Inc. announced 2 weeks ago that the company has appointed Richard White as their new Chief Executive Officer.

In addition, the company also announced that it has secured $2M in investment capital from its existing investors Venture Coaches, Axis Capital Corporation and prominent angels and the Business Development Bank of Canada.

Mr. White takes over the responsibilities from Gord Harling who co-founded the company. Mr. Harling continues to serve the company as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Commenting on his appointment, Mr. White said that he was attracted to Elliptic because of the company's products, customer traction and the team. "I view Elliptic’s semiconductor-based security cores and protocol accelerator IP, in particular those related to wireless and digital rights management, as addressing significant high growth markets. A few of these IP products are now shipping in volume and this early customer validation really highlighted for me the strength of the products and the team’s ability to execute."

Tim April of the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) noted that the funds will be for new development and to expand Elliptic's sales and marketing efforts. "Like Richard, we are impressed with the technology and the team at Elliptic. They have a compelling embedded solution with proven traction at a cross section of global customers".

As a former CEO of Solidum and Accelerix, Mr. White brings to Elliptic more than 25 years of experience in technology companies building and managing high performance teams. Through his consulting company he has also provided contract CEO support services to several other semiconductor companies. Mr. White began his career as a semiconductor engineer at Mitel. He has also worked at NovAtel and Extreme Packet Devices in senior management roles. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Carleton University and an executive MBA from Harvard.

Headquartered in Ottawa, Elliptic Semiconductor Inc provides semiconductor intellectual products (SIP) for secure communications ranging from low power TCP/IP implementations with associated IPsec and SSL security through ultra-high speed link security solutions at multiple Gigabit per second throughput rates. All designs consist of comprehensive reference implementations including semiconductor IP blocks, software drivers and APIs and supporting software designed to speed time to market and offer complete, proven interoperability to customers.