Industry Semiconductors Products Semiconductors Website www.global-silicon.com Type of business Private | Services Consultancy Founded 28 October 1997 | |
Number of locations Hong Kong SAR, China PRC | ||
Global Silicon Limited is a fabless semiconductor company founded in 1997 in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Global Silicon designed and produced system level semiconductors for the consumer audio market. Global Silicon created a number of new ICs that were noteworthy for the level of system integration that was achieved. Initial products focused on solutions for CD players, later expanding to also include MP3 and WMA compressed formats. Global Silicon's DART IC was used in the CD/MP3 Boombox (Philips AZ3038) and a subsequent IC (Xin) was used in a number of consumer products including the CD/MP3/WMA boombox (Packard Bell OP10). Global Silicon created a number of patents to cover the new technology that had been created. Global Silicon did not achieve commercial success, the investors decided to close the company in 2006 citing lack of sales traction. In 2007, the CTO of Global Silicon purchased the company's intellectual property (excluding patents), stock and assets including a HK subsidiarity and has been operating the company from Hong Kong since. Currently Global Silicon is a consulting company and consumer audio design house.
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Founding and investment
Global Silicon was founded in Cambridge, UK by engineer Martin Brennan. Initially the company was called "The Cheap & Cheerful Chip Company Limited". Brennan was joined by engineer Morgan Colmer in 1998. Together Brennan and Colmer developed an FPGA based demonstration for a new CD player IC that integrated the functions of several system ICs into one system-on-a-chip (SoC). After successfully raising £2 million (GBP) from investment firm MTI in 1999, the company went on to turn the demonstration system into an ASIC. The company changed its name to Global Silicon prior to the first round of investment. In 2005, Global Silicon received further investment of £5.7 million (GBP) from a consortium of investors made up of MTI, Quester and Celtic House.
Management
Products
Global Silicon produced 6 different ICs with varying degrees of success. All of the semiconductor products are now discontinued.
Patents and technology
Global Silicon's initial products focussed on the Compact Disc player market and one of the key pieces of technology that was created on the Xin-Core platform, was a complete CD player including servo, data decoder and audio player. Upon this base, the company also created their own hand-crafted implementations of MP3 and WMA decoders. Additional DSP effects were created as was a User Interface (UI) layer that could easily be customised for the majority of consumer audio applications. Patents created by the company were:
Closing the UK company
In December 2006, the board decided to close the business and a buyer was sought for the IP, stock and assets. The investors cited "investment in Global Silicon was written off following its failure to get significant sales traction despite having a proven product". It is also self-evident that the loss of the company's Chairman, William Jeffrey due to cancer will have factored in the decision process. The timing of the closure was also at a pivotal point in the consumer audio market, with Compact Disc equipment sales falling and being replaced with products such as the iPod. The company's extensive patent portfolio was sold separately.
Management buyout
In January 2007, the company CTO, Morgan Colmer, purchased from the administrators the intellectual property (IP), stock and assets of the company including a Hong Kong subsidiary. All assets and intellectual property were then transferred to the subsidiary company (of the same name) and has operated since as a consulting business in Asia.