Chipcon

Norwegian company Chipcon AS, headquartered in Oslo and a wholly owned subsidiary of Texas Instruments since 24 January 2006—and from then on known as Texas Instruments Norway AS—develops electronic chips for short-range RF (radio) communications.

Founded as an ASIC design center in 1996 by SINTEF SI researchers Geir Førre, Sverre D. Moen, and Svein A. Tunheim. In 1998, Chipcon became a fabless semiconductor company. Chipcon has a software design center in San Diego, California and sales offices in New Hampshire, Germany, Hong Kong, and Japan (Tokyo). All in all, the company has operations at 42 locations in 27 countries. As of 2005^[update], Chipcon employs about 120 people.

In accordance with its focus on the ZigBee standard, Chipcon in early 2005 bought U.S. company Figure 8 Wireless, which develops Zigbee system software. Typical applications of Chipcon's products are in home automation systems such as lighting and heating control and alarms, as well as TV and video game remote controls. As of 2005^[update], the company's most successful sales lay in the market of wireless controllers for Xbox and PlayStation 2 video game consoles. During the first ten years since its founding, Chipcon had sold 20 million of its RF chips.

Texas Instruments paid $200 million (~ 1.36 billion NOK) for Chipcon.

External links

• TI home page
• Chipcon home page
• TI Completes Acquisition of Chipcon – TI press release, 24 January 2006

Coordinates: 59°56′30.73″N 10°43′1.03″E / 59.9418694°N 10.7169528°E / 59.9418694; 10.7169528