Global Silicon

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 based demonstration for a new CD player IC that integrated the functions of several system ICs into one system-on-a-chip (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. 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.

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 player market and one of the key pieces of technology that was created on the Xin-Core platform, was a complete CD player including servo, data decoder and audio player. Upon this base, the company also created their own hand-crafted implementations of MP3 and WMA decoders. Additional DSP effects were created as was a User Interface (UI) layer that could easily be customised for the majority of consumer audio applications.

Patents created by the company were:

Digital audio processing

In January 2007, the company CTO, Morgan Colmer, purchased from the administrators the intellectual property (IP), stock and assets of the company including a Hong Kong 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.