LONDON — Icera Inc., a fabless semiconductor startup that has developed a baseband processor for mobile equipment, has raised $20 million from London-based venture capital company 3i Group plc.

The money is being counted as part of Icera's Series C round of financing, which was announced at $40 million in March 2006. The contribution of 3i takes the Series C round to $60 million and the total raised by Icera (Bristol, England) since its formation in 2002 to $102.5 million.

3i joins Benchmark Capital Europe, Atlas Venture, Accel Partners and Amadeus Capital Partners in backing Icera and Laurence Garrett, a partner at 3i, is joining the board of directors of the startup, Icera said.

Stan Boland, president and chief executive officer of Icera, said in a statement that the investment from 3i, a past investor in Cambridge Silicon Radio — now CSR plc — would help Icera's potential to grow into a "large, successful wireless chipset and software company."

"From our experience in the wireless semiconductor market, via investments like TTPCom, Ubinetics and DiBcom, we believe that Icera is already amongst the top three private semiconductor firms in the world and we are excited to work with the team to build the next multi-billion dollar business which will revolutionize mobile phone design," said Garrett in the same statement.

Icera's processor is called Livanto and it has been sampling since September 2005. The processor supports high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) as well as established standards such as GSM, GPRS and EDGE. Because Livanto is software programmable it can be extended to cover other standards such as HSUPA, WiMAX and mobile digital television (MBTV). The fact that multiple standards can be consolidated on a single device is claimed to be a compelling argument in favor of Livanto.

In theory, handsets could be field-upgraded as new infrastructure and standards are rolled-out. However this would require similar handset flexibility in aspects other than the baseband.