Monday, February 28, 2011

CHiL Semiconductor sells for a cool $75M

By Rodney H. Brown

Tewksbury-based CHiL Semiconductor Corp. has agreed to be bought for $75 million in cash by International Rectifier Corp. of California, which will add CHiL’s chip-based digital power management platform to its existing technology offerings.

Venture-backed CHiL last raised funds in a $16.7 million Series C round in May of 2008. That brought the total financing for the company to $31 million over three rounds since it was founded in 2006.  According to International Rectifier (NYSE: IRF) officials, CHiL and the El Segundo-based company have had a strategic relationship for about a year.

While officials wouldn’t say what would happen to the 45 employees of CHiL, Chief Financial Officer Marc R. Jones did say about whether the company would be relocated: “They are acquiring the entire organization, but I think our presence in Tewksbury will be long-term.”

Officials said the sale is expected to close soon, by the end of this quarter. Publicly traded International Rectifier listed more than 4,500 employees as of December 2010, with a market cap of $2.25 billion.

Like CHiL, International Rectifier is heavily into the digital power management technology market, producing chip-based products with such names as DirectFET, PowIRstage and SupIRBuck, serving markets from automotive to enterprise servers. CHiL is more focused on the servers, personal computers and high-volume computing market segments. In May 2010, CHiL announced a new series of energy management chips for high-end graphic processing units, with its first deployment in Nvidia Corp.’s GTX 480 Fermi video card.