Intel & iWatt make Major Announcements during the Digital Power Forum
During the first day of this year's Digital Power Forum (DPF '06), Intel Corp. announced its membership in the PMBus Organization and iWatt Inc. announced that it has acquired privately-held Simple Silicon, Inc. (SSI). At the opening Plenary session, Thomas Macdonald, Vice President, Advanced Chipset and Platform Division with Intel, announced the company's participation as a formal member of the PMBus Organization.
"Industry standards on digital power management communication will facilitate end user efficiencies and system customization," Macdonald stated during his Plenary address to the DPF '06 delegates. "PMBus will be the best power and thermal management interface. Intel expects to help drive PMBus to support all the needs of the Enterprise Data Center."
Also during the first day of DPF '06, iWatt announced its acquisition of SSI. SSI designs analog front ends (AFEs) for products such as LCD TVs, digital cameras and DVD players, and analog building blocks such as power management, ADCs, DACs, PLLs. The combination of iWatt's high-performance digital control technology and SSI's precision analog expertise is intended to enable further integration of analog and power functions in next generation ASICs as well as standard products for the computing, telecom and consumer markets.
"Over the past six years, SSI has established themselves as a premier supplier of breakthrough analog IP" said Curtis Davis, President and CEO of iWatt. "The key to their success has been the development of high-performance AFEs that they leverage into ASIC and ASSP silicon solutions by working closely with leading customers in the consumer and communication markets. We are very excited to be joining forces with such a strong technical team which will help us to expand and accelerate the growth of iWatt."
As a part of the merger, iWatt will be reorganized into two business units. Curtis Davis will continue as President and CEO of iWatt. Gyan Tiwary will assume the role of Senior Vice President and General Manager of Consumer and Custom Products. John Wagner will be the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Computing and Infrastructure Products. Xuecheng Jin, formerly Chief Technology Officer at SSI, will become Vice President of IC Engineering and will continue to support SSI's current business. Bob Porter will continue in his role as Vice President of System Engineering.
