Field programmable gate array company Xilinx Inc has agreed to acquire the low power complex programmable logic devices business of Philips Semiconductor, a subsidiary of Philips Electronics North America Corp, the San Jose-based company said Friday. Under the deal, Xilinx will buy Philips’ CoolRunner CPLD technology along with its XPLA set of design tools. Financial terms were not disclosed, although Xilinx said the deal was not expected to dilute its financial performance.
Along with the technology, Xilinx expects to take on 40 Philips employees working on CoolRunner product development, including an IC team in Alburquerque, New Mexico and a software team in Sunnyvale, California. Philips will retain the rights to use CoolRunner’s Fast Zero Power technology in embedded system-on-a-chip designs, and the CoolRunner products would continue to be made at Philips’ wafer fabs in Europe and at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
CoolRunner products have been designed to run at very low power, and the Fast Zero technology enables a stand-by mode drawing virtually no power, making the chips suitable for battery operated portable equipment. Philips says it wants to concentrate its efforts on the consumer, telecommunications and automotive markets, using its discrete, logic and microcontroller product lines, but says it plans to work with Xilinx on future joint developments such as system-on-a-chip designs.
Xilinx’s traditional competitor in the field programmable chip market has been Altera Corp. But in April (CI No 3,645), Lattice Semiconductor acquired Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s Vantis Corp for $500m in cash. Xilinx had been rumored to be the most likely suitor. Based on last year’s proforma financial results, the combined revenues of the two companies would have been around $400m, compared to Xilinx with sales of $662m in the past year. Altera, which acquired privately-held tools company Boulder Creek Engineering earlier this month, made revenues of $654.3m last year.
Others also have their eye on the market. Zilog Inc licensed Tensilica Inc’s Xtensia MPU architecture earlier this year (CI No 3,599), and more recently agreed to work with Fort Worth, Texas-based Production Languages Corp on configurable custom chip architectures. FPGA technology holds the promise that electronic devices can be instantly programmed and re-programmed to perform any number of functions, and new communications technologies, along with programming languages such as Java, have extended the possibilities to include remote updates.
