Jennic Limited was a privately held UK-based

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 1996. The company developed microcontrollers that integrated radios with low-power wireless standards support; particularly 802.15.4,

6LoWPAN 6LoWPAN (acronym of "IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks") in '6LoWPAN: The Embedded Internet', Shelby and Bormann redefine the 6LoWPAN acronym as "IPv6 over lowpower wireless area networks," arguing that "Personal" is no longer rel ...

and

ZigBee Zigbee is an IEEE 802.15.4-based specification for a suite of high-level communication protocols used to create personal area networks with small, low-power digital radios, such as for home automation, medical device data collection, and othe ...

. It also supplied wired communications products, e.g. ATM and

RapidIO The RapidIO architecture is a high-performance packet-switched electrical connection technology. RapidIO supports messaging, read/write and cache coherency semantics. Based on industry-standard electrical specifications such as those for Ethern ...

cores.

History

Founded by CEO Jim Lindop, Jennic's main investors included UK billionaire

Eddie Healey Edwin Dyson Healey (22 April 1938 – 21 August 2021) was a British billionaire businessman. Career He and his brother, Malcolm were born in Kingston upon Hull. They started work in their family's paint firm, and soon started a DIY chain, Statu ...

. In addition to its headquarters in Sheffield, UK, the company had offices in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

, and the US. Customers included IBM,

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globall ...

Johnson Controls Johnson Controls International is an American Irish-domiciled multinational conglomerate headquartered in Cork, Ireland, that produces fire, HVAC, and security equipment for buildings. As of mid-2019, it employed 105,000 people in around 2,0 ...

and

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...

. Originally focused on IP licensing and design services, Jennic repositioned to focus on fabless semiconductor design in 2004. Jennic also received funding from the Department of Trade and Industry in 2005. In July 2010, Jennic was acquired by Netherlands-based

NXP Semiconductors NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NXP) is a Dutch semiconductor designer and manufacturer with headquarters in Eindhoven, Netherlands. The company employs approximately 31,000 people in more than 30 countries. NXP reported revenue of $11.06 billion in 2 ...

for $12.2 million, plus an additional $7.8 million in consideration if certain performance targets were met. Approximately 50 UK-based Jennic employees transferred to NXP, and the organization operated as the NXP Low Power RF product line based in

Sheffield, England Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire and ...

for a time, but in 2020, NXP decided to close the site in Sheffield.

Technology

Products developed by Jennic included JenNet, a wireless networking stack based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. JenNet-IP included a

protocol stack. Jennic was the first chipset manufacturer to support this protocol for their 802.15.4 products. In May 2011, NXP announced its intent to release

JenNet-IP Within computer networking, JenNet-IP software is an enhanced 6LoWPAN network layer for ultra-low-power 802.15.4 based wireless networking. Using a "mesh-under" networking approach, JenNet-IP is designed to enable the Internet of Things and can se ...

network layer software under an

open source license An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified and/or shared under defined terms and conditions. This allows end users and commercial compan ...

."NXP open sources JenNet-IP for Internet of Things"
''Electronics Weekly'', 19 May 2011, Retrieved 26 May 2011

References

{{Reflist

External links

Official site

NXP Semiconductors
Fabless semiconductor companies Companies established in 1996 Electronics companies of the United Kingdom 1996 establishments in England