Qualcomm buys chip design firm for $ 1.4 billion

Qualcomm will start 2021 with a major acquisition: the company announced, acquires chip design firm Nuvia for about $ 1.4 billion. It plans to capitalize on the intellectual property and expertise acquired through the business in a wide range of Qualcomm products.

Nuvia is a very young company, founded in 2019 by three executives who previously worked on Apple’s semiconductor team and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The not-so-recent founding wasn’t smooth anyway: Apple sued one of Nuvia’s founders, saying it was trying to hunt down professionals on its own team from the Cupertino giant. Responding to the allegations, Nuvia, meanwhile, talked about it was Apple who was trying to grab startup employees to make the startup company impossible.

The acquired company is currently focused on designing custom ARM-based processor cores for servers, but Qualcomm plans to leverage the competencies of the ingested team in a wide range of products, including mobile GPUs, AI engines, DSPs and dedicated devices. your multimedia accelerators will also benefit. In addition to smartphones, Qualcomm plans to use the technology from Nuvia in next-generation notebooks, digital car displays and driving assistance systems.

With the acquisition, Nuvia’s team of just under a hundred employees and the company’s founders will continue to work for Qualcomm. The parties have not yet provided details of exactly when the acquisition could be completed – which, of course, will even have to go through mandatory competition investigations.