OCZ Acquires UK Design Team from PLX Technology

OCZ technology, a well renowned manufacturer of SSDs and various other computer hardware, just announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the UK Design Team and certain assets from PLX Technology, to further strengthen the company’s global research and development group.

PLX’s UK Design Team was in charge with building system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for NAS servers and other similar storage devices.

Apart from the acquisition of the engineering team, OCZ will also gain access to the intellectual property (IP) developed by this group, which the company states it will allow it to accelerate solid state drive development.

This will help reduce the time to market of next generation SSD products, while also decreasing development costs.

The PLX Design Team acquired by OCZ is comprised of approximately 40 engineers located in Abingdon, United Kingdom.

“We are pleased to augment our engineering organization with the UK Design Team as they have been providing best of breed system-on-chip designs, software, and firmware since 1992,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology.

“We believe the additional engineers along with the access to increased IP resources will enable us to significantly reduce the costs associated with storage protocol licensing, while simultaneously speeding our time to market,” concluded the company's rep.

Under the perms of the agreement, PLX will retain their existing line of products which they will continue to support and supply to their customer base, and any patents related to the technology, for which OCZ will receive a perpetual license.

Ever since it decided to focus its attention on the SSD market, OCZ made great efforts to gain access to the intellectual property required for designing its own solid state drive controllers, all of these culminating with the purchase of Indilinx in March of this year.