Irvine’s Solarflare Communications Inc., Orange County’s 11th-largest chipmaker by employee count, is being acquired by San Jose-based computer technology giant Xilinx Inc., the companies announced last week.
Terms of the acquisition were not immediately disclosed; the deal is scheduled to close later this year.
Solarflare employs about 75 people locally, and more than 200 in total. Its semiconductors are used for a variety of networking applications, with customers in industries ranging from fintech to cloud computing.
Xilinx, which has a market value of $30 billion, was part of a funding round for privately held Solarflare last year. A few months ago, the two firms unveiled their first product together, a new type of network interface card—products that are designed to plug into a server or storage box to enable connectivity to an Ethernet network.
“This proof-of-concept demo is an important stepping stone to developing advanced SmartNICs that can run network, storage, and compute acceleration directly on the network interface card, eliminating the need to run these workloads on servers, dramatically improving performance and reducing power consumption,” Xilinx said on its blog this March.
The Xilinx blog post said that Solarflare is “the number one technology supplier in fintech” and said the new product being developed between the two firms “is a step toward enabling a broad set of use cases such as inline machine learning, video transcoding and data analytics.
“Acquiring Solarflare brings Xilinx both market-leading technology and exceptional engineering talent with expertise in networking hardware, software, firmware and drivers,” said Salil Raje, executive vice president and general manager, Xilinx’s Data Center Group, in a statement last week.
Solarflare has been in business since 2001, and has raised more than $300 million in a series of funding rounds over the years. Recent investors have included Oak Investment Partners, Anthem Venture Partners, Acacia Capital Partners, and Miramar Venture Partners.
