Qualcomm is in advanced talks to acquire Israeli chipmaker Wilocity for around $300 million, claims a new report.
According to financial news site TheMarker, both the companies are in the discussions of terms on all the provisions of the deal. Qualcomm as well as Wilocity are yet to comment on the report.
US chipmaker Qualcomm along with Marvell Semiconductors, Cisco, Benchmark Capital, Sequoia and Vintage Investment Partners, is an investor in Wilocity, the developer of high-speed 60GHz WiGig chip, in the early raising of $105 million. The company had further raised $35 million last year.
Wilocity, founded in the year 2007 by Intel alumni including Tal Tamir and CEO Danny Rettig, has till date shipped over a million chipsets to PC manufacturers including Dell.
The company ships chipsets for the IEEE 802.11ad standard published last year that defines short-range wireless communications in the 60GHz spectrum, with channels running at data rates of up to 7Gbps. The chips will enable users to download any heavy data content at a faster rate.
Back in February, Wilocity unveiled its first smartphone chipsets, Wil6300, at the MWC 2014, which offers 4.6Gbps connections, running at between 200 and 300mW in operation, and are built on a 28nm process.
The report, citing sources from Wilocity, claims that the employees were informed about the acquisition about 2 weeks ago. Wilocity is based in Israel with about 60 employees, who are likely to be transferred to Qualcomm’s development center in Haifa. Representatives of Qualcomm have reportedly conducted several rounds of interviews with the Wilocity staff.
