Ericsson may have offloaded its mobile processor business into the struggling ST-Ericsson joint venture, but the hardware vendors are all seeking to increase their influence over core chip technologies. The Swedish giant has acquired UK start-up Aspex Semiconductor, which specializes in parallel processing systems.
The UK firm, a spin-out from Brunel University near London, brings its new parent a series of parallel processing accelerator boards and the whole engineering team. The price was not disclosed although a local report states that Aspex has repaid loans of £1.75m ($2.7m) since March 31 and that investor Spark Ventures expects to receive more than £7m (about $10m) after completion of the sale.
Aspex was founded in 1999 to develop a multiprocessor technology known as associative string processing says EETimes. As it sought a specific market application, it focused mainly on software programmable media processors. These are built around its ASProCore DSP fabric.