TSMC invests $65M in Tela!?!?!?!!

[Daniel Nenni]

TSMC invests in Tela:

TSMC aiming for more than financial returns with its investment in US start-up Tela Innovations - Blog - Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) - Maximising IP Value for Business

This will be a very interesting story once the details come out so stay tuned on this one.

 

[Daniel Payne]

Nice business development deal by Tela Innovations, I remember visiting their booth at DAC a few years ago and blogging about it.

I first met Dhrumil Gandhi at Silicon Compilers back in the 1980's, a very smart technology guy.

Tela Innovations has fewer than 50 employees, so this one investment is worth more than $1M per employee, now that's a nice sum, well done.

 

[Daniel Nenni]

TSMC got 25% of Tela and settled a patent action by Tela:

TELA INNOVATIONS, INC. FILES COMPLAINT AT THE U.S. INTERNATIONAL TRADE COMMISSION FOR UNFAIR TRADE PRACTICES STEMMING FROM PATENT INFRINGEMENT @ Tela Innovations, Inc.

 

[Daniel Payne]

How is TSMC involved with the litigation if Tela named the patent respondents as: HTC Corporation, LG Electronics, Motorola Mobility, Nokia and Pantech?

 

[Daniel Nenni]

Sorry, wrong link, here it is:

EDA 'David' Files Suit Against TSMC | IHS Electronics360

 

[Daniel Payne]

Ok, that makes sense now. Very strange that Tela has this essential power-reduction technology and litho-optimized FinFET standard cell libraries used by TSMC, but that it took a lawsuit to get TSMC to pay up fully.

 

[Daniel Nenni]

I have an investigative blogger on this story so there will more information coming soon.

 

[Tom Simon]

This kind of thing seems to happen a lot in our industry. One notable example was the lawsuit by Cadence against CCT for using 'private' API's in SKILL to develop an 'unauthorized' tool integration. Ultimately Cadence and CCT came to terms and Cadence actually acquired CCT. Their routing technology became key technology for Cadence routing solutions.