Company type | Private (acquired by Broadcom) |
---|---|
Industry | semiconductor |
Fate | Acquired by Broadcom |
Headquarters | Cambridge, United Kingdom |
Key people | Robert Swann (Co-Founder) Steve Barlow (Co-Founder) Jalal Bagherli (CEO) |
Number of employees | 15 (2001) [1] |
Alphamosaic Ltd was a fabless semiconductor company specialising in low power mobile multimedia processors, based on their VideoCore architecture. [2]
Alphamosaic was founded in Cambridge, UK by Robert Swann [3] and Steve Barlow in October 2000, as a spin out from Cambridge Consultants supported by venture capital from Prelude Trust, [4] ACT and TTP Ventures.
The company developed semiconductor coprocessor chips for the processing of audio, video, imaging, graphics, games and ring tones. The coprocessors were based on VideoCore technology that the company developed, and announced in November 2002.
Later in 2002, Alphamosaic announced the launch of their first multimedia processor, VC01.
In September 2004, Alphamosaic was acquired by Broadcom for $123 million, [5] forming its Mobile Multimedia group on the Cambridge Science Park site.
MIPS Tech LLC, formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. and MIPS Technologies, Inc., is an American fabless semiconductor design company that is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of RISC CPU chips based on it. MIPS provides processor architectures and cores for digital home, networking, embedded, Internet of things and mobile applications.
ARM is a family of RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) for computer processors. Arm Holdings develops the ISAs and licenses them to other companies, who build the physical devices that use the instruction set. It also designs and licenses cores that implement these ISAs.
ATI Technologies Inc. was a Canadian semiconductor technology corporation based in Markham, Ontario, that specialized in the development of graphics processing units and chipsets. Founded in 1985, the company listed publicly in 1993 and was acquired by AMD in 2006. As a major fabless semiconductor company, ATI conducted research and development in-house and outsourced the manufacturing and assembly of its products. With the decline and eventual bankruptcy of 3dfx in 2000, ATI and its chief rival Nvidia emerged as the two dominant players in the graphics processors industry, eventually forcing other manufacturers into niche roles.
Qualcomm Incorporated is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software and services related to wireless technology. It owns patents critical to the 5G, 4G, CDMA2000, TD-SCDMA and WCDMA mobile communications standards.
Renesas Electronics Corporation is a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, initially incorporated in 2002 as Renesas Technology, the consolidated entity of the semiconductor units of Hitachi and Mitsubishi excluding their dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) businesses, to which NEC Electronics merged in 2010, resulting in a minor change in the corporate name and logo to as it is now.
Broadcom Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company that made products for the wireless and broadband communication industry. It was acquired by Avago Technologies for $37 billion in 2016 and currently operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of the merged entity Broadcom Inc.
OMAP is a family of image/video processors that was developed by Texas Instruments. They are proprietary system on chips (SoCs) for portable and mobile multimedia applications. OMAP devices generally include a general-purpose ARM architecture processor core plus one or more specialized co-processors. Earlier OMAP variants commonly featured a variant of the Texas Instruments TMS320 series digital signal processor.
Alchemy is a family of ultra low power embedded microprocessors originally designed by Alchemy Semiconductor for communication and media devices. Alchemy processors are SoCs integrating a CPU core, a memory controller, and a varying set of peripherals. All members of the family use the Au1 CPU core implementing the MIPS32 instruction set by MIPS Technologies.
Tilera Corporation was a fabless semiconductor company focusing on manycore embedded processor design. The company shipped multiple processors in the TILE64, TILEPro64, and TILE-Gx lines.
VideoCore is a series of low-power mobile multimedia processors originally developed by Alphamosaic Ltd and now owned by Broadcom. Alphamosaic marketed its first version as a two-dimensional DSP architecture that makes it flexible and efficient enough to decode a number of multimedia codecs in software while maintaining low power usage. The semiconductor intellectual property core has been found so far only on Broadcom SoCs.
TriMedia is a family of very long instruction word media processors from NXP Semiconductors. TriMedia is a Harvard architecture CPU that features many DSP and SIMD operations to efficiently process audio and video data streams. For TriMedia processor optimal performance can be achieved by only programming in C/C++ as opposed to most other VLIW/DSP processors which require assembly language programming to achieve optimal performance. High-level programmability of TriMedia relies on the large uniform register file and the orthogonal instruction set, in which RISC-like operations can be scheduled independently of each other in the VLIW issue slots. Furthermore, TriMedia processors boast advanced caches supporting unaligned accesses without performance penalty, hardware and software data/instruction prefetch, allocate-on-write-miss, as well as collapsed load operations combining a traditional load with a 2-taps filter function. TriMedia development has been supported by various research studies on hardware cache coherency, multithreading and diverse accelerators to build scalable shared memory multiprocessor systems.
UNISOC, formerly Spreadtrum Communications, Inc., is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Shanghai which produces chipsets for mobile phones. UNISOC develops its business in two major fields - consumer electronics and industrial electronics. Consumer electronics includes smartphones, feature phones, smart audio systems, smart wearables and other related devices. Industrial electronics cover fields such as LAN IoT, WAN IoT and smart displays.
The ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore is a 32-bit multi-core processor that provides up to 4 cache-coherent cores, each implementing the ARM v7 architecture instruction set. It was introduced in 2007.
XMOS is a fabless semiconductor company that develops audio products and multicore microcontrollers. The company uses artificial intelligence and other sensors in the platforms that it develops. It creates voice interface technology developments for applications in various services that are voice activated.
ST-Ericsson was a multinational manufacturer of wireless products and semiconductors, supplying to mobile device manufacturers. ST-Ericsson was a 50/50 joint venture of Ericsson and STMicroelectronics established on 3 February 2009 and dissolved 2 August 2013. Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, it was a fabless company, outsourcing semiconductor manufacturing to foundry companies.
Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing unit (CPU) cores that implement the ARM architecture family of instruction sets. It also designs other chips, provides software development tools under the DS-5, RealView and Keil brands, and provides systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip (SoC) infrastructure and software. As a "holding" company, it also holds shares of other companies. Since 2016, it has been majority owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.
MaxLinear is an American hardware company. Founded in 2003, it provides highly integrated radio-frequency (RF) analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products for broadband communications applications. It is a New York Stock Exchange-traded company.
NetLogic Microsystems, Inc. was a fabless semiconductor company that developed high performance products for data center, enterprise, wireless and wireline infrastructure networks. The company was founded in 1995 by Norman Godinho and Varad Srinivasan, became a public company on the NASDAQ exchange under the leadership of CEO Ronald Jankov in July 2004 and was acquired by Broadcom Corporation for $3.7 billion in February 2012.
The ARM Cortex-A7 MPCore is a 32-bit microprocessor core licensed by ARM Holdings implementing the ARMv7-A architecture announced in 2011.
Imageon was a series of media coprocessors and mobile chipsets produced by ATI in 2002–2008, providing graphics acceleration and other multimedia features for handheld devices such as mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). AMD later sold the Imageon mobile handheld graphics division to Qualcomm in 2009, where it was used exclusively inside their Snapdragon SoC processors under the Adreno brand name.