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Discera Inc. has raised $17.5 million in Series C funding to support the launch of its silicon oscillators for consumer electronics products.

With its potential replacement for quartz crystal-based timing devices - a decades old technology where component and manufacturing costs have stubbornly refused to go down - the San Jose-based company said the new money will help it access the $3.5 billion oscillating semiconductor market.

In return for the latest round of financing, which closed last Monday, Jim Jones, a partner with lead investor Scale Venture Partners, will get a seat on the company's six member board. Scale Venture Partners backed Discera from its $400 million Scale Venture Partners II fund, which the firm began investing in 2005.

"The company fits precisely where our firm is focused," Jim Jones, a partner with Scale Venture Partners, said. "They are taking a proven product and trying to secure and grow their revenue stream."

Newcomer Horizon Ventures and previous investors Qualcomm Ventures, 3i Group PLC and Ardesta LLC also took part in the deal, though Scale Venture Partners is now the largest shareholder in the company, Chief Executive Tom Willey said. Neither the company nor its investors would disclose the percentage of company stock each investor owns.

Used in consumer electronics devices ranging from mobile phones to cameras to alarm clocks, quartz crystal oscillators have been one of the least changing areas in the electronic components industry, according to Douglas McEuen, a senior analyst with ABI Research. The oscillators are used to maintain order in the timing of commands sent through channels within devices.

Discera says its silicon-based oscillators are much smaller and easier to integrate than quartz crystal ones.

There are few companies working on micro-electromechanical systems resonator technology, McEuen said. Sunnyvale Calif.-based SiTime Corp., which is also developing a MEMS chip, is one competitor.

Large Asia-Pacific firms such as Seiko Epson Corp. and Nihon Dempa Kogyo Co. dominate the sector, producing chips that end up being a minor part of the overall cost of various electronic products, he said.

"They definitely have the capability of replacing those parts," McEuen said. "But it's going to be a bit of a long road going up against such established companies."

The deal comes only weeks after Discera announced a MOS1 oscillator chip production agreement with Vectron International Inc., a major manufacturer of resonance chips. The two events, according to Willey, put the company in a good position to introduce their product into a market.

"What this investment is doing is it lets us take production up to the scale we would like," Willey said, "while putting together the working capital to market our product."

Including the new round, Discera has raised about $35 million since its founding in 2001.

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