Phoenix Technologies Ltd, once of Norwood, Massachusetts, now in Santa Clara, has just moved to acquire San Jose-based Virtual Chips Inc in a share exchange valuing the target at about $20m – and we can look for more such deals from the clean personal computer ROM BIOS pioneer, because president and chief executive Jack Kay told Reuter the company had around $50m in cash available for further acquisitions it may be willing to make in the future. He said the acquisition of Virtual aimed to provide a higher level of integration of technologies which would result in a whole host of profit and margin relief to our customer base, enabling them to get new personal computers to market faster – and desktop computers have only about a four-month lifecycle on store shelves anyway. Virtual Chips, described as the leading supplier of synthesizable cores – re-usable semiconductor process-independent circuit descriptions used as building blocks for key interconnect standards, such as Peripheral Component Interconnect and Universal Serial Bus in complex integrated circuit designs, with cores for the IEEE 1394 interconnect standard and Accelerated Graphics Port on the way – will become part of Phoenix’s Special Products Division, which supplies products and services to help manufacturers meet computer interconnect standards. Virtual’s customers include Fujitsu Ltd, Hitachi Ltd, IBM Corp, NEC Corp, Oki Electric Industry Co Ltd, Scientific Atlanta Inc, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssys teme AG, Silicon Graphics Inc, Sony Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc and Texas Instruments Inc.
