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Broadcom acquires Silicon Spice

Margaret Kane ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 07 Aug 2000 16:02 BST

Broadcom will acquire privately-held Silicon Spice, in a deal worth $1bn.

Silicon Spice makes semiconductor technology for high-density voice, fax and data packet transport over wide area networks. It sells to manufacturers of communications equipment like carrier gateways, access gateways and remote access concentrators, which connect traditional telephone networks to packet-based networks like the Internet.

Cisco Systems is a customer and investor in Silicon Spice.

Broadcom will issue five million shares of stock for all outstanding shares of Silicon Spice. Broadcom said it expects to record a one-time write-off for purchased in-process research and development expenses related to the deal in its third quarter ending 30 September.

Broadcom was up 1 11/16 to 240 5/8 in recent trading.

The goal is of Silicon Spice technology is to allow carriers to deliver voice and data services simultaneously over a unified data network at higher density.

Silicon Spice has invented a new signal processing architecture that surpasses the density and power dissipation of existing voice-over-packet network solution, and has demonstrated the highest channel densities ever achieved in a single-chip, the companies said.

Spice was run by Vinod Dham, who helped create the K6 processor while he was vice president of computation products at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). He also played a role in the development of the Pentium while an executive at Intel.

The companies did not say specifically what his role would be at Broadcom.

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