Multinational technology firm Intel Corp has made an announcement that it is acquiring a chip manufacturer called eASIC based in Santa Clara. However, the details of the deal have not been disclosed yet. An Intel spokeswoman stated that the amount was “not material.”
The acquisition has basically been made to assist Intel’s efforts to diversify away from CPU chips and to boost up the technology utilization along with improved performance, cost, power and life cycles of product.
“We’re seeing the largest adoption of FPGA ever because of the explosion of data and cloud services, and we think this will give us a lot of differentiation versus the likes of Xilinx. We’ll be able to offer an end-to-end lifecycle that fits today’s changing workloads and infrastructure. No one on the marketplace will have this,” said Dan McNamara, corporate vice president and GM of the PSG.
Founded in 1999, eASIC has 120 employees and the company’s investors include Khosla, Kleiner Perkins and Seagate. Till now, it has raised a total funding of $149 million. In November last year, the company’s valuation was around $110 million.
The team and technology of eASIC will join Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group (PSG). This programme was formed after the company had acquired Altera in 2015 for $16.7 billion. Technically, Intel has been using technology by eASIC over the past three years in its custom Xeons, and with this acquisition, eASIC will now become a part of the company itself.
“The eASIC team has developed and deployed a truly innovative structured ASIC product. The marriage of the eASIC technology with IP and capabilities of Intel will allow the ubiquitous deployment of this proven structured ASIC product into a wide breadth of exciting end applications and markets. This is the perfect time to usher in this new chapter for eASIC,” said Ronnie Vasishta, president and CEO of eASIC.
Intel is already the largest processor maker and through this acquisition, the company expects to improve this leadership to areas such as chips that handle functions such as memory, modems, purpose-built custom chips known as ASICs, vision processing units (VPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).
With this particular acquisition, Intel Corp will surely do much more wonders in the technology field and come up with improved and fresh innovations for the tech-oriented world.