Qualcomm to acquire chip design co.

NEW DELHI: Qualcomm Inc., a pioneer in Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) digital wireless technology, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Spike Technologies, Inc., a semiconductor design services company, headquartered in Milpitas, California, with a design center in Bangalore, India.

The addition of Spike's engineering resources strongly complements Qualcomm's commitment to provide third-generation (3G) CDMA customers and partners with design, sales and technical support around the world. Qualcomm will pay approximately $19 million in cash for the acquisition of Spike Technologies, Inc. and affiliated companies. Completion of the transaction is subject to regulatory approval and certain other closing conditions.

The key areas of Spike's service expertise are in physical design for deep submicron process technologies, circuit development, and design and verification engineering for pre-silicon design debug and analysis.

Spike Technologies will be integrated into Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT) and help it further address the increasing demand for faster time to market of more feature-rich products in 90 nanometer (nm) and below process technologies. This acquisition supports Qualcomm's commitment to helping its customers and partners address increasing demand for more advanced features on wireless 3G CDMA devices worldwide.

"The acquisition of Spike Technologies underscores Qualcomm's drive to expand the markets and engineering resources for our products worldwide and to deliver a broad series of chipset platforms for the wireless industry," said Sanjay K. Jha, executive vice president and president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. "Spike Technologies brings additional semiconductor chip design and development and software expertise to Qualcomm, and will strongly complement the ongoing work our existing hardware and software engineering teams provide around the world."