Silicon Valley makes rare bet on silicon with startup Barefoot

San Francisco

FOR nearly two decades, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley have been losing interest in the technology that gave the area its name. One startup is convincing them to take another look at silicon.

The brightest star in this long-neglected segment of the tech market is Barefoot Networks Inc. It's building a new kind of customisable chip for the ubiquitous equipment that companies use to send data between computers.