Simtek Corporation
Company type | Public company |
---|---|
Industry | Semiconductors |
Founded | 1987 |
Fate | acquired |
Headquarters | Colorado Springs, United States |
Products | memory chips |
Parent | Cypress Semiconductor |
Simtek Corporation, headquartered in Colorado Springs, CO, was an early leader in the development of SONOS memory technology which it used in its nvSRAM product line which featured a SONOS Flash memory coupled with an SRAM shadow memory to achieve both speed and non-volatility. The company was acquired by Cypress Semiconductor in September 2008. Simtek was a fabless company that relied on wafer foundry manufacturing support from Chartered Semiconductor, DongBu HiTek, and Cypress.
History
[edit]Simtek Corporation was founded in 1987 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The company sold a product called the NOVRAM (nonvolatile RAM) a Non-volatile random-access memory that combined a shadow-RAM (SRAM) with an EEPROM. It was designed to allow the SRAM to operate (at high SRAM speeds) for most of the time, but when it received a signal (usually sent by the system when a power failure was imminent) the entire contents of the SRAM were copied into the EEPROM at a very high speed thanks to the internal parallelism of the device.
Business affairs
[edit]In March 1991 Simtek went public, trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol 'SMTK". Harold A. Blomquist became CEO in 2005 replacing Douglas Mitchell who had served for seven years.[1]
The company was acquired in September 2008 by Cypress Semiconductor in a deal valued at $46M.[2] In the quarter immediately before it was acquired, Simtek posted revenues of $7.5M and a net loss of $2.7M.[3] Cypress pledged to continue to support Simtek's product line after the acquisition.[citation needed]
In 2008 the company re-branded as AgigA Tech Inc.[citation needed]
References
[edit]- ^ "Simtek chairman Blomquist named president and CEO", EE Times, 2005-05-10, retrieved 2009-02-22
- ^ LaPedus, Mark (2008-08-01), "Cypress buys Simtek for $46 million", EE Times
- ^ Simtek Corporation SEC filings (2008-08-14), FORM 10-Q, retrieved 2009-02-22