Reports: Google buys chip design firm Agnilux

Peter Clarke, EE Times
(04/21/2010 11:21 AM EDT)

LONDON — Google Inc. is following Apple into the IC design business by buying a chip design team company, according to reports. Google has bought Agnilux Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), which was formed by former design engineers who had been brought into Apple and then quit to form their own company.

Agnilux was founded in about December 2008 but very little is known about the company except that the name is compound of the Sanskrit word for fire — agni — and the Latin word for light — lux. It was speculated that the design team could be proposing to reduce server power consumption by designing a multiprocessing ARM chip as a server engine, just as the team when working at Apple is believed to have worked with an ARM architectural license to improve power efficiency and extend battery life.

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