After 10 years and at least US$194 million in funding raised, chip maker Cortina Systems Inc. is ready to go public. The company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday.

It's a preliminary S-1, so we don't yet know how big an offering Cortina would float. The proposed maximum offering price is $100 million.

Cortina, which sells chips for optical networking and Passive Optical Network (PON)s, has always been unprofitable since its 2001 founding, although it claims non-GAAP profitability for 2008 through 2010.

Table 1: Cortina's Numbers ($M)

	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010
Revenue	41.6	142.2	152.1	127.5	141.1
Net Income (Loss), GAAP	(12.2)	(6.9)	(4.5)	(21.3)	(10.7)
Net Income (Loss), non-GAAP	n/a*	n/a*	17.5	0.35	10.9
Source: Cortina S-1 filing. * Not listed on the S-1.

Canaan Partners , DCM - Doll Capital Management , El Dorado Ventures , Institutional Venture Partners , Kodiak Venture Partners and Morgenthaler all stand to make some money off the IPO, as does Cortina's largest shareholder, Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), which has about a 12 percent stake.

Why this matters
What Cortina has in common with NeoPhotonics is that both have been around seemingly forever and finally have the chance to go public. It's a combination of being well established in the market and finding a period with high enough interest in tech IPOs.

With regard to the latter point, investors seem eager to find a way into optical networking, as analyst Andrew Schmitt of Infonetics Research Inc. has been saying for quite a while.

For more
Here's a Cortina timeline, in reverse chronological order, including our 2007 conviction that the company was an IPO possibility.

• Cortina Builds off Acquisitions
• Cortina Goes Home
• Cortina Systems Inc.: Top 10 Private Companies
• Cortina Buys a PON Plan
• Cortina's Comfortable With Intel Inside
• Intel Hands Off to Cortina

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading