Apple's mergers and acquisitions: # 27, 31 and 45

#27) P.A. Semi

Led by the founders of SiByte, P.A. Semi has emerged from two years in stealth mode with plans for a family of low-power, high-performance platform processors. Based on IBM's PowerPC cores, the startup's PWRficient processors are 64-bit multicore devices that are scalable from portable applications to high-end super computers.

Semiconductor industry veteran Dan Dobberpuhl co-founded P.A. Semi in July 2003 with Leo Joseph and Amarjit Gill. These three previously co-founded the aforementioned SiByte, which developed the first integrated multicore SOC and was acquired by Broadcom in 2001 for about $2 billion in stock.

Dobberpuhl, the company's president and CEO, is an industry luminary who previously served as VP and GM of Broadcom's Broadband Processor division following Broadcom's acquisition of SiByte. Before that, he worked for Digital Equipment Corporation for more than 20 years, and was the lead designer of the DEC Alpha processor series and the StrongARM processors, the industry's first truly high-performance and low-power processor.

Gill, executive VP of sales and business development, was VP of sales and business development at SiByte. Over his 17 years in the embedded-microprocessor industry he has worked at National Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, and Digital Semiconductor, where he served as director of sales for global accounts.

COO Joseph served as VP of marketing and business operations at SiByte. Previously, he was marketing manager for the StrongARM product line at Digital Equipment Corporation, where he was responsible for the worldwide marketing and business development of StrongARM microprocessors.

The "P.A." in the company's name refers to P.A. Semi's original location, Palo Alto, Calif. The company has since relocated to Santa Clara.

P.A. Semi managed to build up a workforce of 150 people while in stealth mode, with the founders self-funding the company up to the first 80 employees. P.A. Semi then engaged with two investors, Bessemer Venture Partners and Venrock Associates, which have led two rounds of funding. The company has not disclosed financial details of the funding.

P.A. Semi's license agreement with IBM allows the startup to develop its own PowerPC cores independently of IBM, making P.A. Semi only the fourth commercial PowerPC-based products supplier, along with AMCC, Freescale and IBM itself.

P.A. Semi designed its PWRficient 64-bit multicore processors to bring low power and high throughput to applications requiring high-performance processing. P.A. Semi's multicore SOC architecture can scale from 1 GHz to 2.5GHz per core with very low power consumption. The first PWRficient platform processor, for example, is a dual-core chip running at 2 GHz that dissipates between 5 watts and 13 watts, depending on the application.

P.A. Semi is building its chips in a 65-nm process from an un-named foundry partner. The process provides the company with extremely high integration capabilities, enabling minimal chip count in systems. The PWRficient chips essentially integrate everything but the DRAM and Flash memories.

Because of the PWRficient chips' scalability, P.A. Semi is targeting a range of markets, from printing and imaging solutions to datacom and network infrastructure and server/server blade infrastructure. While diverse, these markets share a common need for high performance, low power, and throughput and cost efficiency.

The highly integrated PWRficient processors replace the typical three- to five-chipset platform with a single chip. P.A. Semi's high-level strategy behind the processor family is to build a number of different blocks that the company can connect together in various configurations to stamp out new physical designs with a minimal amount of effort. In fact, after the initial product launch, P.A. Semi expects to be able to tape out a new chip on a quarterly basis.

The architectural elements are:

· PA6T core ?PowerPC-compliant, 64-bit core.

· CONEXIUM coherent ordered crossbar - features a scalable on-chip interconnect that can integrate one to eight SMP cores. Also has 512 KB to 8 MB L2 cache and one to four 72-bit ECC-capable DDR2 memory controllers.

· ENVOI I/O system ? SERDES I/O for PCI Express, XAUI, SGMII, SATA/SAS, RapidIO; specialized I/Os as required; reconfigurable to suit diverse applications.

· Offload engines ? Hardware accelerators embedded into the I/O system: TCP/IP, iSCSI, IPSec, SSL, encryption and authentication, RAID processing.

To minimize cost and design effort for customers, P.A. Semi developed a strategy based on sockets, which are defined by the package, pinout and power envelope. The three sockets - entry, mid-tier and high-end ? enable customers to design to a specific socket, instead of to a specific processor, so they can easily upgrade or change their PWRficient solutions.

The company will launch its first products in Q3 2006, targeting compute servers, telecom, datacom and storage markets. The first PWRficient chip, the PA6T-1682M, is a dual-core product that dissipates 5 watts to 13 watts, depending on the application. Single-core and quad-core versions are due in early and late 2007, respectively, with an eight-core version planned for 2008.

P.A. Semi has a working, 100% functional 65-nm test chip. The test chip has fully functional analog and digital circuits, and the company has verified full-speed operation of all the chip's elements.

We do not often see startups whose target markets are almost exclusively dominated by the likes of Intel, AMD, IBM, Toshiba and other industry heavyweights. Transmeta tried it, and things did not work out so well. Nevertheless, P.A. Semi certainly has a lot going for it, in particular industry legend Dobberpuhl and a 130-strong team of engineers with an average of 10 years' experience under their belts. The platform processor they developed has the versatility, performance and cost-efficiency the company's potential customers are hungry for.

However, while P.A. Semi has taken the performance-per-watt idea to remarkably high levels, the company did not invent the concept and all of its competitors understand the imperative of providing high-performance, low-power devices. P.A. Semi's initial parts will not launch until late 2006, and who knows what Intel, AMD and others will come out with during the intervening year.

On the plus side, while the x86 architecture is dominant with data center tier-one companies such as H-P and Dell, IBM develops PowerPC-based systems. In addition, P.A. Semi has an opportunity to help the tier-two players compete against the tier-ones. The second-tier guys are very focused on improving power density and are always on the lookout for competitive advantages.

P.A. Semi's management team has the same impressive pedigree as the company's founders. The team includes Jim Keller, VP of engineering/Architecture Group, who was the director of architecture at Broadcom and SiByte and a Senior Fellow at AMD. He earlier worked at DEC, where he coarchitected the Alpha 21164 and 21264 processors..

Sribalan Santhanam, VP of engineering/Design Group, served as director of implementation at Broadcom and SiByte. Before that he was with DEC, where he led the implementation of the StrongARM SA-1500 processor and served as a key designer on the SA-110 and Alpha 21064 and 21164 processors.

Peter Bannon, VP of architecture, was previously at Intel as an Intel Fellow, working on Itanium platform design. Prior to that, he was with Compaq Computers and DEC, where he was the coarchitect of the DEC Alpha 21164 and 21164-A and developed the VAX design.

Mark Hayter, chief system architect and Sr. director of system engineering, also came from Broadcom and SiByte. Prior to that, he was at the DEC Systems Research Center, where he was the project lead for the VirtualBook.

Puneet Kumar, Sr. director of systems software, is also a veteran of Broadcom and SiByte, where he was a software architect and senior manager of software engineering. Prior to that, he was at the DEC Research Center, where he was the software architect for the first hard-drive-based MP3 player.

Wayne Meretsky, director of customer systems engineering, previously worked at AMD. An AMD Fellow, Meretsky built the AMD software development team, coauthored the x86-64 specification, and conceived and drove AMD's x86-64 strategy. Prior to that, he was the technical lead for the Macintosh OS at Apple Computer, where he drove the PowerPC transition. Meretsky has also held positions at Rational and Data General.

Sanjay Iyer, director of marketing, joined P.A. Semi from The Linley Group, where he was a senior technology analyst. Prior to that, Iyer cofounded two startups, and was director of technical marketing at RealChip and the GM of the Technology Division of Aureal. Iyer also held engineering positions at Silicon Graphics and AMD.

http://www.insidechips.com/public/6363print.cfm

#31)

Intrinsity was a privately held Austin, Texas based fabless semiconductor company; it was founded in 1997 as EVSX on the remnants of Exponential Technology and changed its name to Intrinsity in 2000. It had around 100 employees and supplied tools and services for highly efficientsemiconductorlogic design, enabling high performance microprocessors with fewer transistors and low power consumption. The acquisition of the firm by Apple Inc. was confirmed on April 27, 2010.

Intrinsity's main selling point was its Fast14 technology, a set of design tools implemented in custom EDA software, for using dynamic logic and novel signal encodings to permit greater processor speeds in a given process than naive static design can offer.

Concepts used in Fast14 are described in a white paper:[2] and include the use of multi-phase clocks so that synchronisation is not required at every cycle boundary (that is, a pipelined design does not require latches at every clock cycle); 1-of-N encoding where a signal with N states is carried as a voltage on one of N wires with the other N-1 grounded, rather than being carried on log(N) wires which can be in arbitrary states; and a variety of sophisticated routing algorithms including ones which permute the order of the wires in a bundle carrying a 1-of-N signal in such a way as to reduce noise exposure, and ones which allow complicated gates to 'borrow' delay from simple ones to allow a shorter clock cycle than a more pessimistic design approach permits. Converters between the two signal encodings are readily available, and are useful for interfacing to blocks of static logic.

This technology has been used to implement ARM, MIPS and Power Architecture cores, which Intrinsity licences under the name of FastCores; the first implementation was FastMATH, a MIPS-based DSP-like microprocessor implemented in 130 nm technology and introduced in 2002. It operates at 15 W power at 2.0 GHz and 1 V, and 6 W power at 1 GHz and 0.85 V; it was awarded Best Extreme Processor in 2003 by Microprocessor Report.[3] The design took 16 months by a team of 45 engineers.

In July 2009, Intrinsity announced that it had developed in collaboration with Samsung a 1 GHz implementation of the ARM Cortex-A8 chip; it had developed a similar high-speed implementation of the Cortex-R4 chip two years earlier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity

#45)

Passif Semiconductor was a Silicon Valley start-up founded by two former University of California, Berkley students. The company’s goal was to reduce the power consumption of wireless chips, a topical subject given the increasing number of radios modern smartphones and other devices are expected to pack in.

According to Lessin’s sources, the deal – made earlier this year – was not the first time Apple showed interest in Passif. In fact, the company is believed to have attempted to buy the start-up several years ago, at the time offering “mid-tens-of-millions of dollars” but rebuffed.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans” a company spokesperson told AllThingsD.

Although Apple is standoffish about the reasons behind its purchase, it’s not hard to see where low-power wireless could come into its current range – or, indeed, its rumored devices. The iPhone and iPad each incorporate multiple radios, for cellular and short-range connectivity, while Apple’s MacBook line has been shrinking with each generation.

However, it’s the tipped “iWatch” smartwatch project and Apple’s interest in wearables which arguably makes the most sense for Passif’s technology. One of the long-standing concerns around smartwatches has been their limited power supply, so if Apple could address that using new, lower-powered chips then it could gain an edge over rivals like Pebble.

Apple has acquired Passif Semiconductor, a low-power wireless chip specialist with a product range that includes Bluetooth LE support for wearables like smartwatches. The deal, confirmed by Jessica Lessinand AllThingsD, has been confirmed by Apple, but no financial details – nor examples of what the Cupertino company intends to do with the wireless expertise – have been revealed.

http://www.slashgear.com/apple-buys-low-power-wireless-specialist-passif-semiconductor-01292467/

NumberDateCompanyBusinessCountryValue (USD)ReferencesDerived products

1	March 2, 1988	Network Innovations	Software	United States	—	[7]	—
2	June 7, 1988	Orion Network Systems	Satellite communication systems	United States	—	[8]	—
3	June 27, 1988	Styleware	Computer software	United States	—	[9]	AppleWorks GS
4	July 11, 1988	Nashoba Systems	Computer software	United States	—	[10]	FileMaker
5	January 3, 1989	Coral Software	Computer software	United States	—	[11]	—
6	February 7, 1997	NeXT	Computer programming services	United States	US$404,000,000	[12]	Mac OS X, iOS
7	September 2, 1997	Power Computing-Clone-Making[note 1]	Clone computers	United States	US$100,000,000	[13]	—
8	January 8, 1999	Xemplar Education	Software	United Kingdom	US$4,926,000	[14]	—
9	November 3, 1999	Raycer Graphics	Computer graphic chips	United States	US$15,000,000	[15]	—
10	January 7, 2000	NetSelector	Internet software	United States	—	[16]	—
11	April 11, 2000	Astarte-DVD Authoring Software[note 2]	Software	Germany	—	[17]	DVD Studio Pro
12	2000 (Q4)	SoundJam MP[note 3]	Software	United States	—	[18]	iTunes
13	2001	Bluefish Labs	Productivity software	United States	—	[19]	iWork
14	May 11, 2001	bluebuzz	Internet service provider	United States	—	[20]	—
15	July 9, 2001	Spruce Technologies[note 4]	Graphics software	United States	—	[21]	DVD Studio Pro
16	December 31, 2001	PowerSchool	Online info systems services	United States	US$62,000,000	[22]	PowerSchool
17	February 1, 2002	Nothing Real	Special effects software	United States	US$15,000,000	[23]	Shake
18	April 4, 2002	Zayante	FireWire chips and software	United States	US$13,000,000	[24]	FireWire
19	June 11, 2002	Silicon Grail Corp-Chalice[note 5]	Digital effects software	United States	—	[25]	Final Cut
20	June 20, 2002	Propel Software	Software	United States	—	[26]
21	June 21, 2002	Prismo Graphics	Special-effects titling software for film and video	United States	—	[27]	LiveType (Final Cut Studio)
22	July 1, 2002	Emagic	Music production software	Germany	US$30,000,000	[28]	Logic & GarageBand
23	March 2005	Schemasoft	Software	Canada	—	[29]	File formatting (iWork)
24	April 2005	FingerWorks	Gesture recognition company	United States	—	[30][31]	iOS multitouch
25	October 16, 2006	Silicon Color	Software	United States	—	[32]	Apple Color (Final Cut Studio)
26	December 4, 2006	Proximity	Software	Australia	—	[33]	Final Cut Server
27	April 24, 2008	P.A. Semi	Semiconductors	United States	US$278,000,000	[34]	Apple A4, A5 (SoC)
28	July 7, 2009	Placebase	Maps	United States	—	[35]	Maps
29	December 6, 2009	Lala.com	Music streaming	United States	US$17,000,000	[36]	iCloud, iTunes Match
30	January 5, 2010	Quattro Wireless	Mobile advertising	United States	US$275,000,000	[37]	iAd
31	April 27, 2010	Intrinsity	Semiconductors	United States	US$121,000,000	[38]	Apple A5 (SoC)
32	April 27, 2010	Siri	Voice Control Software	United States	—	[39]	Siri
33	July 14, 2010	Poly9	Web-based mapping	Canada	—	[40]	Maps
34	September 20, 2010	Polar Rose	Face-Recognition	Sweden	US$29,000,000	[41]	iPhone software (camera)
35	September 14, 2010	IMSense	High Dynamic Range Photography	United Kingdom	—	[42]	iPhone software (camera)
36	August 1, 2011	C3 Technologies	3D Mapping	Sweden	US$267,000,000	[43]	Maps
37	December 20, 2011	Anobit	Flash Memory	Israel	US$390,000,000	[44]	iPhones and iPads
38	February 23, 2012	Chomp	App search engine	United States	US$50,000,000	[45]	iPhones and iPads
39	June 2, 2012	Redmatica	Audio	Italy	—	[46]	Logic Pro
40	July 27, 2012	AuthenTec	Security hardware and software for PCs and mobile devices	United States	US$356,000,000	[47]	iPhones and iPads
41	September 27, 2012	Particle	HTML5 web app firm	United States	--	[48]	Web
42	March 23, 2013	WiFiSlam	Indoor location	United States	US$20,000,000	[49]	Maps
43	July 19, 2013	Locationary	Maps	Canada	—	[50]	Maps
44	July 19, 2013	HopStop.com	Maps	United States	—	[51]	Maps
45	August 1, 2013	Passif Semiconductor	Semiconductor	United States	—	[52]	—
46	August 13, 2013	Matcha	Media discovery app[53]	United States	—	[54]	—