XMOS in $26m investment from Huawei & Bosch

July 21, 2014 by admin
Filed under: Exclusive, News

Bristol-based chip designer XMOS has signed one of the largest chip deals so far this year with a $26m investment that could drive the company into the Internet of Things. “There’s not many chip companies getting funded here or in the US so that is quite a standout event in itself,” said Nigel Toon, XMOS CEO.

The investment comes from Robert Bosch, Huawei and Xilinx Technology Ventures is to accelerate development of the next generation multicore, low latency, low cost processors and programmable I/O. XMOS is looking to expand its silicon design team as a result, says Toon.

The deal includes investment from Europe, the US and China. “Huawei is an interesting partner,” said Toon. “They are focussed on investing in Europe which is a small part of the reason but they are the number 3 supplier in smart phones and interested in the whole extension of that into the Internet of Things – there are quite a few overlap areas. And a partnership with a company like that in China is tremendous.” Last month Huawei announced it was setting up an R&D centre in Bristol.

The XMOS technology fits well with Bosch in automotive, industrial and consumer, and Hongquan Jiang, Investment Principle at Robert Bosch Venture Capital, will join the XMOS board. “XMOS is one of the most exciting young semiconductor companies around today and we see a huge potential for their intelligent multicore technology in various sectors of our parent company,” he said.

The third leg of the investment is FPGA vendor Xilinx. “There’s nothing explicit with Xilinx but we are both programmable companies, we are lower power, they are heavily focussed on infrastructure so there’s a lot of overlap in our general interests,” said Toon, who used to work for arch-competitor Altera. “We have some common distributors so we can benefit from that.”

More on Huawei and XMOS from the FT: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7de0d9d4-0e9a-11e4-a1ae-00144feabdc0.html

www.xmos.com