Now that Integrated Device Technology Inc has exited the Intel-compatible chip market by selling its Centaur unit off to Via Technologies, the company has been able to come to a cross-licensing agreement with Intel Corp. Interestingly, Intel is paying Santa Clara, California-based IDT $20.5m as part of the agreement, which also includes use of each other’s intellectual property covered by the patents, and licensing of each other’s technologies. No further terms of the agreement were disclosed. Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel’s Desktop Products Group, said in a statement that the new agreement provides the design engineers of both Intel and IDT with greater flexibility as they design new products.
IDT is selling off its Centaur patents to VIA as part of the acquisition, finalized earlier this month (CI No 3,719). It also struck up a patent cross-licensing agreement with VIA as part of the deal. IDT will now focus on its communications chip business, a sector which Intel has been showing an increasing interest in after its recent acquisitions of Level One Communications Inc (closed yesterday) and Softcom Microsystems Inc.
IDT’s other products include static random access memory, especially cache memory products for use in PCs, embedded RISC microprocessors based on the MIPS chip, and high-performance logic products. IDT has been putting research and development efforts into specialty memory products for communications and networking, including an advanced SRAM architecture said to significantly improve performance of communications applications requiring frequent switches between reads and writes.
