BRISTOL, England — Icera Inc., a venture capital backed fabless chip company with a chipset and software modem for high-speed packet access (HSPA), has delayed a planned initial public offering of shares until about 2010, while it plans to raise more private money to fund its push into the Long-Term Evolution communications standard.

Nigel Toon, vice president of marketing at Icera, confirmed the plan but declined to say how much Icera was looking to raise. Some sources have put the amount as high as $100 million which would make Icera one of the most heavily funded fabless semiconductor startups ever.

"We were thinking of an IPO in 2009. With LTE coming down the pike we will likely delay the IPO until 2010 and raise some more money privately. We know some people – financial institutions and strategic investors – who've shown an interest to do that with us. It will allow us to address coming standards at a more aggressive pace," said Toon.

Icera, founded in 2002, has already raised $142 million and the company diluted its venture capitalists' position when it wrote paper to fund the acquisition of Sirific Wireless Inc. (Waterloo, Canada) in April. The nominal value of the deal has not been revealed. Sirific itself had raised $63 million prior to acquisition giving the enlarged Icera a VC tally of $205 million and a head count of 260 people.

Such a head count means that Icera, which so far has only penetrated the HSPA data card market, is burning cash. Without an IPO in sight Icera needs to raise money and at $300 million the exit of five to ten times investment that VCs have traditionally sought could only be achieved by an IPO raising $1.5 billion or more.

Toon insisted that Icera is well placed to achieve such an IPO. Although Icera only began shipping its silicon for the 3G broadband card business last year it believes it is ahead of the competition technically, including Qualcomm Inc., the only other chip vendor supplying HSPA silicon at present, he said. "The card market went from 5 million units in 2006 to 20 million units in 2007 and we are looking at 45 to 50 million units in 2008," said Toon. While admitting that Qualcomm had almost all of that market in 2007 Toon asserted that according to sources Qualcomm did $350 million worth of business in the card market alone.