Apple Acquires Low-Power Chip Designer PA Semi

Recent reports have revealed that Apple has agreed to do business, to a bigger or smaller extent, with chip designer PA Semi, as in, it bought them. Answering the burning questions coming from Forbes, an Apple spokesman confirmed that they decided to buy PA Semi for their sophisticated designs for low-power chips that can enhance the iPhone's and the iPods' functionality (and their popularity implicitly) even more.

PA Semi is a rather small chip company counting 150 employees. It was founded in 2003 by Dan Dobberpuhl, who was a lead designer for Alpha and StrongARM microprocessors developed by Digital Equipment in the 1990s, the aforementioned source notes.

"Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not comment on our purposes and plans," said Apple spokesman Steve Dowling, declining to give specifics on the value of the deal. However, a person "familiar with the deal" suggested it was done for $278 million in cash, according to Forbes.

Jobs and Senior Vice President Tony Fadell led the small group of executives who spearheaded the acquisition, according to a source "affiliated with the chip company," Forbes posts, which included talks that even took place at Jobs' place.

Intel, the world's largest semiconductor company and the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, is directly affected by Apple's recent move as the giant chip maker has been trying to get Apple addicted to its chips. Samples include Intel's latest low-power lineup of chips, dubbed Atom.

"Although no current Apple products use P.A. Semi chips, Apple executives kept a close eye on the work of the start-up," Forbes notes, adding that "talks of acquiring P.A. Semi began only in the past few weeks." News broke out as a result of Apple notifying its employees of the deal.

P.A. Semi is a fabless semiconductor company delivering the world-class PWRficient processors for the multibillion-dollar high-performance embedded-computing markets. Led by chip-industry luminary Dan Dobberpuhl, the company has one of the most respected microprocessor design and architecture teams ever assembled. PWRficient 64-bit multicore processors, based on the Power Architecture, redefine power, cost, and throughput efficiency in high-performance processing.

UPDATE: this article has been modified to confirm with PA Semi's correct business model, which is "designing" chips that other companies manufacture.

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