Global Silicon Limited is a

fabless semiconductor company Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclus ...

founded in 1997 in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

. Global Silicon designed and produced system level semiconductors for the consumer audio market. Global Silicon created a number of new ICs that were noteworthy for the level of system integration that was achieved. Initial products focused on solutions for

CD players A CD player is an electronic device that plays audio compact discs, which are a digital optical disc data storage format. CD players were first sold to consumers in 1982. CDs typically contain recordings of audio material such as music or audio ...

, later expanding to also include

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

and WMA compressed formats. Global Silicon's DART IC was used in the CD/

Boombox A boombox is a transistorized portable music player featuring one or two cassette tape recorder/players and AM/FM radio, generally with a carrying handle. Beginning in the mid 1980s, a CD player was often included. Sound is delivered through ...

(

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters i ...

AZ3038) and a subsequent IC (Xin) was used in a number of consumer products including the CD/

/ WMA boombox (Packard Bell OP10). Global Silicon created a number of patents to cover the new technology that had been created. Global Silicon did not achieve commercial success, the investors decided to close the company in 2006 citing lack of sales traction. In 2007, the CTO of Global Silicon purchased the company's

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

(excluding patents), stock and assets including a HK subsidiarity and has been operating the company from

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...

since. Currently Global Silicon is a consulting company and consumer audio design house.

Founding and investment

Global Silicon was founded in Cambridge, UK by engineer Martin Brennan. Initially the company was called "The Cheap & Cheerful Chip Company Limited". Brennan was joined by engineer Morgan Colmer in 1998. Together Brennan and Colmer developed an

FPGA A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturinghence the term '' field-programmable''. The FPGA configuration is generally specified using a hardware de ...

based demonstration for a new CD player IC that integrated the functions of several system ICs into one

system-on-a-chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memory ...

(SoC). After successfully raising £2 million (GBP) from investment firm MTI in 1999, the company went on to turn the demonstration system into an

ASIC An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficien ...

. The company changed its name to Global Silicon prior to the first round of investment. In 2005, Global Silicon received further investment of £5.7 million (GBP) from a consortium of investors made up of MTI, Quester and Celtic House.

Management

* William Jeffrey served as CEO and Chairman from the initial investment in 1999 until he took a leave of absence in 2006 following being diagnosed with terminal cancer. * Martin Brennan served as Managing Director until he left Global Silicon in 2001 to form a new audio company called 3GA. * Morgan Colmer served as the CTO for the company until 2006 and then participated in the management buy out of company assets and from 2007 has served as the Managing Director. * David Leith served as the CEO of the company from 2003 until 2004. * Steve Cliff served as Sales and Marketing Director from 2004 to 2005. * Andrew Hamer served as Sales and Marketing Director from 2002 to 2003. * Nick Rich served as CFO from December 2004 to October 2006, then served as Managing Director until December 2006.

Products

Global Silicon produced 6 different ICs with varying degrees of success. All of the semiconductor products are now discontinued.

Patents and technology

Global Silicon's initial products focussed on the

Compact Disc The compact disc (CD) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then rele ...

player market and one of the key pieces of technology that was created on the Xin-Core platform, was a complete

CD player A CD player is an electronic device that plays audio compact discs, which are a digital optical disc data storage format. CD players were first sold to consumers in 1982. CDs typically contain recordings of audio material such as music or aud ...

including servo, data decoder and audio player. Upon this base, the company also created their own hand-crafted implementations of

and WMA decoders. Additional

DSP DSP may refer to: Computing * Digital signal processing, the mathematical manipulation of an information signal * Digital signal processor, a microprocessor designed for digital signal processing * Yamaha DSP-1, a proprietary digital signal ...

effects were created as was a

User Interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

(UI) layer that could easily be customised for the majority of consumer audio applications. Patents created by the company were: * Digital audio processing * Driver circuit for a liquid crystal display * Radio receiver ** Divisional filing for above relating to novel demodulation technique * Method for cancelling a beat frequency in a radio receiver * De-bouncing Circuit * Replaying digital media * Sigma-delta modulator * Random number generator * Flash memory error correction * A sigma delta modulator utilizing feedback loop and logic circuit * A network set-up device * Radio tuner user interface

Closing the UK company

In December 2006, the board decided to close the business and a buyer was sought for the IP, stock and assets. The investors cited "investment in Global Silicon was written off following its failure to get significant sales traction despite having a proven product". It is also self-evident that the loss of the company's Chairman, William Jeffrey due to cancerhttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1832018.ece will have factored in the decision process. The timing of the closure was also at a pivotal point in the consumer audio market, with

equipment sales falling and being replaced with products such as the

iPod The iPod is a discontinued series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about months after the Macintosh version of iTunes ...

. The company's extensive patent portfolio was sold separately.

Management buyout

In January 2007, the company CTO, Morgan Colmer, purchased from the administrators the

(IP), stock and assets of the company including a

subsidiary. All assets and intellectual property were then transferred to the subsidiary company (of the same name) and has operated since as a consulting business in Asia.

References

External links

* {{official, http://www.global-silicon.com/
Xin processor gets ready for tape-out

Fabless semiconductor companies Companies based in Cambridge Semiconductor companies of the United Kingdom