Achronix Semiconductor Corp. recently closed a $52 million second round of funding.  The proceeds from the financing will be used to fund the development of next-generation products and to support the rapidly accelerating demand for the recently-announced Speedster family of products.

Argonaut Private Equity led the financing. The original group of first-round investors including Battery Ventures, New Science Ventures, Easton Capital Investment Group and Entrepia Ventures all participated.

“We are very pleased to welcome Argonaut Private Equity to our board and to have the continued strong support from our original investors,” said John Lofton Holt, Achronix co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer. “Being armed with this large amount of capital allows us to focus on execution and making our customers successful. We are excited about the opportunity ahead of us and look forward to expanding the already strong Speedster market traction while building next-generation products for our rapidly growing and demanding customer base,” Holt said.

Based in San Jose, Calif., Achronix is a four-year-old privately held corporation that targets networking, telecommunications and encryption companies for use of its field-programmable gate arrays, a semiconductor device that can be configured by the customer after purchase.

Rajit Manohar is founder and chief technology officer of Achronix.

In other venture capital news:

SiliconBlue Technologies, another provider of a field-programmable gate array technology for consumer applications, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has secured second-round equity funding of $24 million. New Enterprise Associates led the round of funding, with previous investors BlueRun Ventures and Crosslink Capital also participating. SiliconBlue plans to use the funding to accelerate the next phase of the company’s growth by expanding sales operations globally to support new customers. Kapil Shankar is the company’s CEO.

Trusteer, a customer protection company for online businesses, headquartered in New York, recently raised $6 million in a second-round venture capital financing. The round was led by U.S. Venture Partners. Trusteer will use the funds for research and development, to add support for additional platforms, expand its fraud analyst teams to serve new customers and for sales and marketing. U.S. Venture Partners is a Menlo Park, Calif.-based company of about 20 employees that has raised 10 venture capital funds and invested in more than 350 early-stage companies. Rakesh Loonkar is Trusteer’s president.

Maxplore, provider of ServiceMax, a service chain and field service management service, has recently been named the winner of the Force.com $1 million challenge. Force.com’s $1 million challenge is a venture competition that awards a $1 million investment offer to the winning company built on the Force.com platform. Some of the criteria in judging the competition are as follows: likelihood of long-term success, market opportunity, entrepreneur teams’s track record and adoption and innovation utilization of the Force.com platform. Sam Mukherjee is Maxplore’s co-founder and CEO.

Mayfield Fund of Menlo Park, Calif., recently led a $ 10 million round of funding for WideOrbit, a company specializing in revenue management systems for the media industry.

With $2.8 billion under management and teams in the United States, Mayfield partners with individuals to create companies in the United States, China and India. Since its founding in 1969, Mayfield has raised 13 funds for the United States, invested in more than 500 companies, and exited nearly 100 others through mergers and acquisitions.

Navin Chaddha is Mayfield’s managing director.

Intel Capital led a recent $7 million investment in Silicon Hive, a developer of processor cores based in the Netherlands. The money is set to be used to expand the global sales, marketing and customer support organization, which operates from offices in Eindhoven, Bangalore, Tokyo, Seoul and Silicon Valley. Also, the company intends to release additional HiveGo products for image and video processing. "Silicon Hive's technologies strike a balance across the vectors of low power consumption, high processing power, and programmability," said Ashish Patel, managing director of Europe, Middle East and Africa for Intel Capital. Arvind Sodhani is president of Intel Capital.