US DoD May Question Apple’s Acquisition of P.A. Semi

On Monday, P.A. Semi informed its customers it was being acquired, and said it could no longer guarantee supplies of its chips. Apple spokesman Steve Dowling confirmed the acquisition Wednesday.

P.A. Semi, which could be suitable for power-thrifty devices like laptops or the iPhone, is rumored to have been acquired for $278 million in cash. However, Apple refused to reveal the purchase price.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans,” said Dowling.

According to EETimes,  the U.S. Department of Defense could potentially get in the way of  Apple’s acquisition of the company, because “the startup’s PWRficient processor is designed into DoD programs in every major branch of the armed services.”

The source said he is aware of more than 10 defense systems using the PWRficient CPU, one of which recently forecasted it will use 70,000 of the chips over the next ten years. The board company alone forecast it would sell $100 million in products based on P.A. Semi chips over the next four years. Users include defense giants such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon… I don’t know how a Lockheed Martin or a Raytheon would take the news that the part might not be available after a few months or perhaps two years. Typically, these military program last for many years.

In February last year, P.A. Semi  announced a new dual-core processor that boasted 300 percent more efficiency than comparable chips. Its PWRficient processor has two cores running at 2 gigahertz, comparable to Intel chips, while using a third or a quarter of the power. It’s aimed at industrial markets like networking equipment, high-volume storage devices and military applications.

Oddly, the company’s chips are based on IBM Corp.’s Power architecture, which Apple ditched in 2005. Apple’s Macintosh computers currently run Intel Corp.’s chips.

P.A. Semi is a fabless semiconductor company founded in Santa Clara, California in 2003 by Dan Dobberpuhl who was the lead designer for the DEC Alpha and StrongARM processors. The company employs a 150-person engineering team which includes people who have previously worked on processors like Itanium, Opteron and UltraSPARC.