US comms giant Qualcomm is discussing the details of an acquisition of multigigabit WiFi chip maker Wilocity Inc. for about $300 million, according to Israel's news website The Marker.
The deal is not yet complete although Wilocity staff were told about it two weeks ago, the report said. Both Qualcomm and Marvell Technology were collaborators with Wilocity and investors, suggesting that Marvell may have been in competition to buy the WiGig chip company.
Wilocity (Caeserea, Israel) was founded in March 2007 by executives and engineers from Intel's Wi-Fi Centrino group, with a mission to develop 60-GHz wireless chipsets that can transmit data at multigigabit rates. In January 2014 the company announced it had shipped moe than one million WiGig units in its first year of production. The technology was selected to provide wireless connectivity in Dell Ultrabooks featured at the launch of the Windows 8 operating system. Wilocity also partnered with Marvell Technology Group Ltd. to bring forward tri-band Wi-Fi solutions enabled with 802.11ad for the computing, networking and consumer electronics segments.
Wilocity also worked with Atheros Communicatons which became Qualcomm-Atheros in a $3.7 billion takeover in May 2011. Wilocity is reckoned to have raised about $55 million from Benchmark, Sequoia Capital, Tallwood Venture Capital, Qualcomm-Atheros, Jerusalem Global Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners and Marvell Technology.
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