Mindspeed was a fabless chip design company headquartered in Newport Beach, California. With its roots as part of Rockwell's Semiconductor division, it was spun off as a wholly owned subsiduary of Conexant in 1999 and later launched as a standalone public company in 2003, listed on NASDAQ as MSPD. The company's revenues in 2011 were $162 million when it employed 550 staff.
The company designs and sells a wide range of silicon chips for network infrastructure of the wired and wireless communications industry. It's Transcede range of broadband processors was targetted at LTE small cells and made some headway in the market.
In 2012, the company acquired Picochip which complemented their LTE customer base with a large number of 3G small cell customers (claiming 70% market share of deployed 3G small cells).
Mindspeed/Picochip baseband chipsets have been adopted by many pioneering small cell vendors, including ip.access 3G Oyster small cells, Spidercloud's 3G Enterprise E-RAN and Korea Telecom's LTE small cell range.
Read our thoughts on the acquisition when it was announced in January 2012, CTO Doug Pulley's views on the Chinese 3G TD-SCDMA market which they dominated and our interview with Raouf Halim, Mindspeed CEO, from August 2012, a few months after the acquistion of Picochip.
In November 2013, the company announced its acquisition by MACOM, but the wireless assets including the Picochip business was transferred to Intel.
