Aug. 30–Andigilog, a startup semiconductor company based in Chandler, has won $4.2 million in venture capital funding to develop and market integrated circuits that warn of overheating incomputers, cell phones and other electronic devices.

The company, located at 7404 W. Detroit St., raised $1 million in July from Valley Ventures, a Scottsdale-based venture capital firm, and another $3.2 million was announced Thursday from Valley Ventures and Mission Ventures of San Diego.

Andigilog is the first Arizona investment for Mission Ventures, which has focused on investments in southern California companies. Mission Ventures will have a representative on Andigilog’s board of directors. The company intends to use the funds to market existing products and to further expand its product line, said founder and chief executive Carl Liepold.

Andigilog was founded in 1996 and began shipping temperature sensors in 2001. The company has four circuits in production, and three more will be announced next month and another three by early next year, said Gregg Adkin, general partner in Valley Ventures.

Adkin said the company is an attractive investment because it already has products and revenue.

“They are different from other startups that need a lot of capital just to get a product to market,” he said. “They need to ramp up sales and marketing and manufacturing.”

He said the company expects to become profitable by the end of next year.

Prior to the venture capital injection, the company funded itself internally through contract engineering, said spokeswoman Anne Price. To cut costs, Andigilog has contracted with outside foundries to manufacture the circuits, concentrating itself on design and marketing, she said. Andigilog is known in the industry as a “fabless” semiconductor company because it doesn’t operate its own semiconductor manufacturing plants.

The company has about a dozen employees and will hire several more engineers and marketing specialists as a result of the venture funding, Price said. Information on job openings is available at www.andigilog.com.

In a further expansion announced Thursday, Andigilog said it has named a representative to market the company’s products in Silicon Valley and northern California.

The circuits produced by Andigilog are designed to sense overheating inside an electronic device and send signals to a microcontroller that can turn off a screen or take other automatic action to reduce the temperature. As an example of their widespread use, an average cell phone has four temperature sensors, Adkin said.

Temperature sensors have a U.S. market of about $1 billion annually and are used in notebook and desktop PCs, cell phones, personal digital assistants, printers and battery packs. They also function in auto electronic systems, industrial controls and consumer devices such as DVD players and camcorders.

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