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As Silicon Valley suffers a prolonged drought without a chip company going public, Santa Clara's eASIC has stepped into the void, but the company's prospects of making it to Wall Street seem uncertain.

The integrated-circuits company filed [for] an IPO that aims to raise $75 million. eASIC has signed on with Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank to handle its debut, with shares expected to trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol EASI.

The filing arrives as Silicon Valley is less than a month away from its longest period between semiconductor IPOs since the dot-com boom went bust. According to data crunched by Ipreo, a market intelligence firm, Ambarella was the last Silicon Valley chip firm to go public, in October 2012; the longest such gap since the beginning of 2001 was two years and five months, from mid-2001 to late 2003.

"Back in the dot-com heyday, there was a different chip startup on every corner," Gartner semiconductor analyst Michele Reitz noted, but she said survival and entry to the public markets had a tough barrier.

"The amount of capital that needs to be spent to not only develop the chip but then to actually bring it to market is quite high, and its increasing," she said Friday.

eASIC was one of those chip startups in the dot-com era, founded in 1999, and raised the massive amounts of capital it needed from noted venture firms, including Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. From 2004-2010, eASIC raised a total of more than $88 million to produce and market its integrated circuit, which the company says can offer both quick turnaround time and low power consumption, a combination with which competitors can struggle.

"It's got some market potential, but it's a tough row to hoe," Reitz said. "You're competing with design paradigms for chip designers that have been in place for quite a long time."

The company may not have much longer to wait, however. Despite raising an additional $23.5 million through private stock placements with investors and debt holders since 2012, eASIC has less than $9 million in the bank and long-term debt of $18 million.

"They need the money, they're almost out of cash," PrivCo CEO Sam Hamadeh said Friday.

Hamadeh, whose firm studies private companies, pointed out that eASIC took nearly a decade to produce its first product in 2008, had its largest round of venture funding led by an outfit called Advanced Equities that eventually shut down amid SEC investigations, and has struggled for the type of revenue gains that would attract institutional investors.

"It's sort of a tainted company," Hamadeh said in a phone interview. "I'm not sure this IPO is going to go through, to be honest with you."

eASIC has produced strong revenue growth in the past two years, according to the limited financial history provided by the company in its IPO filing: Revenues more than doubled in 2013 and 2014, with sales last year finishing at $67.4 million. Hamadeh pointed out, however, that nearly a third of its 2014 revenues -- $21 million -- came from Seagate, which also happens to be an eASIC investor, holding 14.6 percent of the company before the IPO.

The bulk of the rest of eASIC's income stems from a deal with Ericsson -- 93 percent of eASIC's revenues in 2014 came from its deals with Ericsson and Seagate. In its filing, the company disclosed that Ericsson planned to switch from eASIC chips in some products.

eASIC declined to comment for this story, citing quiet-period regulations.

Besides Seagate, eASIC's major stakeholders include Khosla Ventures (20.8 percent), Crescendo Ventures (15 percent) and Kleiner Perkins (8.8 percent).