Tessera aims to wrap up IPO
Published: 30 Oct 2003 15:45 GMT
If that name sounds familiar it's because Micron, Infineon and others alleged that Rambus, another company specialising in semiconductor intellectual property, improperly manipulated JEDEC procedures. An appeals court rejected the fraud claim, and Rambus will soon go to trial on the infringement case.
The company's IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission also broadly hints more legal actions will come, an issue that will probably be raised in the IPO, which is expected to take place on 13 November, according to IPOhome.com. Approximately 7.5 million shares will be offered, at between $9 and $11, under the symbol TRSA. Although Tessera only has 84 employees, it's hardly a start-up: the company was founded in 1990 and almost went public in 2001. Because it is in a quiet period, the company declined to comment for this story.
Topsy-turvy
The company's technology in some ways can be thought of as the packaging world's equivalent of the Fosbury Flop, the backward high-jump technique pioneered by Dick Fosbury, which changed the sport.
In the early days of the semiconductor market, a chip package might contain two or four electrical leads (for connecting the chip to the board), but now some packages can contain several hundred in a ball grid array, that series of bumps on the bottom of today's chips, said Morry Marshall, vice president of strategic technology at researcher Semico. Funnelling electrical signals through an ever-shrinking package wreaks havoc with the laws of physics.
"We're at the point where those ball grid array packages aren't adequate anymore," Marshall said.
Heat is also a major issue, said Steve Tobak, principal consultant at Invisor Consulting and a former vice president of marketing at Tessera. Motherboards are made of plastic; chips are made of silicon. When boards get hot -- inevitable in modern computers -- they bend and can snap away.
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