EETimes/Loring Wirbel on NewPort Acquisition
eetimes.com
Broadcom makes NewPort its latest acquisition
By Loring Wirbel
EE Times
(08/14/00, 5:40 p.m. EST)
IRVINE, Calif. — Continuing its string of high-profile acquisitions, Broadcom Corp. announced Monday (Aug. 14) the acquisition of NewPort Communications Inc., which is using CMOS process concepts to develop 2.5- and 10-Gbit/second transceivers for Sonet and Gigabit Ethernet.
NewPort was founded by several executives formerly with Rockwell Semiconductor, the predecessor of Conexant Systems Inc. (Newport Beach, Calif.), underscoring Broadcom and Conexant's race to purchase communication IC companies, often at premium prices.
Broadcom will offer 5.5 million shares of stock for NewPort, worth some $1.2 billion based on Broadcom's Friday (Aug. 11) closing price. NewPort has 75 employees located across the street from Broadcom headquarters in Irvine, Calif., in the same building that was the original Broadcom headquarters. The offer comes a week after Broadcom's $1.2 billion acquisition of Silicon Spice and its reconfigurable processor; and only two weeks after Broadcom's $535 million offer to acquire Altima Communications Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), a specialist in 10/100-Mbit/second switching and media-access solutions aimed at enterprise applications. The Silicon Spice and Altima deals followed Broadcom's acquisition of at least five other small semiconductor manufacturers in the last six months.
"Some of this is based on using the cash on hand for strategic acquisitions," said one investment banker who asked not to be cited by name. "But a lot of this is turning into some kind of game of chicken between Broadcom and Conexant. They're trying to create Southern California fiefdoms in high-speed networking, and there seems to be an element of personal one-upsmanship between Nick [Henry 'Nick' Nicholas, chief executive of Broadcom] and Dwight [Decker, chief executive officer of Conexant]."
Nicholas said in a morning conference call that he'd been maintaining some level of friendly discussion with NewPort for three years, and had even offered the founders some advice on developing OC-192 products, though no initial investment had been made at that time. During the past two years, Broadcom and NewPort had done some limited mixed-signal joint designs for OC-48 (2.5-Gbit/s) and OC-192 (10-Gbit/s) designs. The acquisition will accelerate design work on OC-768 (40-Gbit/s) networks, as well.
NewPort was launched by Armond Hairapetian and Lorenzo Longo, both formerly of Rockwell Semiconductor, who left Rockwell before its conversion to Conexant. The two engineers had developed new concepts for front-end Sonet functions involving a new design concept NewPort calls Current-Controlled MOS, or C3MOS. The process requires no special mask steps beyond a standard CMOS process, but allows the integration of analog functions for OC-48 Sonet in a process no more difficult than standard CMOS. At the May NetWorld+Interop show, NewPort debuted its first engineering samples of 10-Gbit transceivers implemented in 0.18-micron CMOS.
"It cannot be stressed enough that C3MOS is a design methodology, requiring no special steppings or process steps whatsoever," said Yossi Cohen, director of marketing in Broadcom's networking business unit. "In fact, we see very little work in bringing the two companies together. We use libraries for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. processes, we use the same fabs, the same test equipment, it will be a very smooth integration."
Nicholas said that both the NewPort and Silicon Spice acquisitions will meld well with Broadcom's own Fusion processor core for simple very-high-speed interconnect, including a serial single-channel version of 10-Gbit Ethernet. Hairapetian, chief executive of NewPort, stressed that NewPort has an equal number of engineers involved in mixed-signal transceiver designs and in digital framer and mux/demux processor design. This will allow NewPort to aid Broadcom in development of Packet Over Sonet, 10-Gbit MAC, and other chips for broadband digital functions.
While a turn to OC-768 likely will require some front-end functions that are not implemented in CMOS, Cohen predicted that the Broadcom and NewPort teams will be able to implement many 40-Gbit functions in CMOS. In the meantime, Cohen said that NewPort has a significant lead in low-power CMOS implementations of transceiver functions at both 2.5- and 10-Gbit/s speeds. In the 10 Gigabit Ethernet market, he said, NewPort's focus on serial implementations represents a perfect complement to Broadcom's own work on four-channel coarse wave division multiplexed transceivers.
"Whatever physical-layer choices the IEEE working group comes up with, we will be able to support them all," Cohen said. |
