Embdded FPGA and AI IP company Flex Logix has been acquired by Analog Devices. The 10-year-old company’s technology assets and technical team will transfer to ADI.

“By acquiring Flex Logix, ADI can significantly enhance our digital portfolio, further supporting our efforts to assist customers in solving their most challenging problems,” an ADI spokesperson told EE Times. The company declined to disclose terms of the deal or any further details.

“I’m excited to welcome the talented team from Flex Logix to ADI!” Gregory Bryant, executive VP and president of business units at ADI, said in a LinkedIn post. “This team, a leader in [eFPGA] technology, joins us as we push forward on our journey to lead at the intelligent edge. Flex Logix’s eFPGA technology—which enables the seamless integration of FPGA fabric into SoCs and ASICs—is one of the key building blocks that will allow us to build differentiated platforms and help solve our customers’ biggest challenges.”

Flex Logix declined to comment, but a notice on the company’s website says that the company’s technical assets and technical team have been acquired and that exiting customers have already been taken care of.

Flex Logix engineer Fang-Li Yuan, who has been with the company since the start, noted on LinkedIn: “What’s unexpected is that our first customer 10 years ago becomes our last customer, who recently decided to acquire us for an even broader adoption of our technology across the product lines.”

Flex Logix was founded by CEO Geoff Tate, CTO Cheng Wang and UCLA professor Dejan Markovic in 2014 based on work done by Wang for his Ph.D. under Markovic. Tate, formerly CEO of Rambus, has served as CEO since the company’s inception. The company emerged from stealth in 2015 with eFPGA IP that allows SoC designers to add flexibility and future-proofing to their designs.

Flex Logix eFPGA customers include DARPA and other U.S. government programs who needed the flexibility and re-programmability of eFPGA at more advanced nodes. Dialog Semiconductor licensed the company’s tech in 2019 for its configurable power management ICs. Renesas’s ForgeFPGA, a small, sub-50-cent FPGA designed to add programmable logic to low-power designs, is also based on Flex Logix IP.

In 2020 the company launched an AI accelerator chip, the InferX X1, for consumer devices and high-volume applications, based on a configurable interconnect fabric borrowed from its eFPGA. While it wrapped up sales of the X1 in 2023, the InferX IP remained available for AI or DSP blocks in SoC designs.

The company raised $82 million in financing.

By: DocMemory
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