Actel Corp, the Sunnyvale, California-based field programmable gate array company, has agreed to acquire AutoGate Logic Inc on undisclosed terms. Privately held AutoGate is a software services company based in Fremont, California, specializing in VLSI development tools for FPGA and custom IC placing and routing. The deal is expected to close within two months.
Actel says the deal will boost its efforts to enter the reprogrammable FPGA market with two new products lines. The first, the Flash memory-based ProASIC, came out earlier this year, and the second, a family of reprogrammable SRAM-based products, are due later this year.
Meanwhile, Fremont, California-based GateField Corp, the FPGA company Actel invested $8m in earlier this year after it warned it was in danger of running out of money (CI No 3,675), has won a further $3m investment, $2m from affiliates of Mitsui High-tec Inc and a further $1m from Actel and Idanta Partners Ltd. GateField is supplying Actel with the ProASIC line or reprogrammable memory.
