Amphion Semiconductor

The company’s legal entity was incorporated in Northern Ireland on April 25, 1990 as Integrated Silicon Systems Limited (company number NI024395).⁠[1]

The company states that it was founded by J. G. Doherty (chief executive) and John McCanny (chief technology officer), was spun out of Queen’s University Belfast and began trading in 1994.⁠[2]

The company raised its first round of finance in February 1999. On December 29, 2000, the legal entity was renamed Amphion Semiconductor Limited.⁠[3][1]

On January 8, 2001, Amphion announced its change of name from ISS and a $10 million second funding round from a syndicate led by Apax Partners funds; Peter Magowan, executive vice president of sales and marketing at ARM Holdings, and Gregorio Reyes, a former chief executive of American Semiconductor Equipment Technologies, joined the board as non-executive directors in a private capacity. The company then had 50 employees worldwide, with corporate headquarters in Belfast, worldwide sales and marketing headquarters in San Jose, California, and sales and support offices in Tokyo and Boston.⁠[3]

Amphion then described its products as “application-specific virtual components” (ASVCs) for multimedia and communications system-on-chip (SoC) designs, such as the CS6650 for real-time MPEG-2 video decompression, along with video and image compression, speech coding and channel coding solutions.⁠[3]

On February 28, 2002, Amphion introduced the CS6510 JPEG2000 encoder hardware accelerator core, which it called the first entirely hardware-accelerated, wavelet-transform-based JPEG2000 encoder core, aimed at digital cameras, 3G/4G infrastructure and handsets, and medical imaging, with licensing available from the second quarter of 2002.⁠[4]

In March 2002 Amphion Semiconductor Ltd received Investors in People accreditation, with an “International Status” endorsement for its US operations in Silicon Valley; the company then had about 60 staff in four countries.⁠[5]

Amphion closed a $5 million funding round led by ACT Venture Capital, with existing investors Apax Partners funds and Enterprise Equity and new investor Invest Northern IrelandInvest Northern IrelandInvest Northern Ireland (Invest NI) is Northern Ireland’s regional economic development agency, a non-departmental public body and arm’s-length body of the Department for the Economy. It was established on April 1, 2002, under the Industrial Development Act (Northern Ireland) 2002 and is headquartered in Belfast.Open the full entry. The company then had 38 employees, and its licensees included Matsushita (Panasonic), NEC, Sony, Xilinx, Conexant and Toshiba.⁠[2]

Amphion released the CS7050 hardware H.264/AVC video decoder core for cable and satellite set-top boxes, DVD players, home gateways, media centre PCs and games consoles, supporting H.264 Main Profile up to Level 4.1 at HD and SD resolutions in fewer than 300,000 gates. Its product line then covered H.264 (AVC), Windows Media 9, MPEG-4, MPEG-2, JPEG2000 and JPEG video and image cores plus AES and 3DES encryption cores, and its worldwide sales headquarters was in Palo Alto, California.⁠[6]

On June 29, 2004, Conexant Systems purchased all of the outstanding capital stock of Amphion Semiconductor Limited. The consideration was $20.0 million in cash and 600,000 shares of Conexant common stock (valued at $6.0 million), plus $0.4 million in transaction costs; Conexant guaranteed a value of $10.00 per share for those shares through June 29, 2006. The former shareholders could receive up to $4.0 million more within 12 to 18 months of the acquisition if certain technology milestones were met. Conexant’s preliminary purchase price allocation assigned $2.6 million to net tangible assets, $4.2 million to developed technology and $19.6 million to goodwill.⁠[7]

Conexant presented the acquisition as furthering its MPEG-4 technology investment and expected the engineering talent and IP it brought to significantly speed the development of its H.264 technology.⁠[8]

At the time of the acquisition Amphion had about 35 employees; Doherty was to remain with the company, which was to keep its name.⁠[9]

On April 29, 2008, Conexant announced the sale of its Broadband Media Processing product lines for satellite, cable, terrestrial and IPTV set-top boxes to NXP Semiconductors for $110 million in cash plus an earn-out of up to $35 million contingent on milestones. The sale was completed on August 11, 2008, and about 700 Conexant employees joined NXP.⁠[10][11]

The set-top box operations Conexant sold to NXP included its Amphion division. In 2008 Amphion’s video decoder cores were incorporated into NXP’s TV550 digital TV SoC.⁠[12]

In February 2010 Trident Microsystems signed an agreement to acquire NXP’s television and set-top box business lines, with NXP taking shares in the new venture. That year Amphion’s decoder cores were incorporated into the 40-nanometre Fusion digital TV SoC.⁠[12]

From November 12, 2004 the original legal entity was named Amphion Semiconductor, without “Limited”, and registered as a private unlimited company; it was dissolved on July 16, 2010.⁠[1]

In 2011 shipments of set-top box chipsets incorporating Amphion video decoder cores passed 100 million, and Intel licensed Amphion’s H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and other cores as the hardware acceleration engines in its C2110 media processors.⁠[12]

On March 9, 2012, Entropic Communications announced that the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware had approved its agreement to acquire Trident Microsystems’ set-top box SoC assets. The assets Entropic acquired included the Belfast-based former Amphion video codec team, whose Malone decoder and Windsor encoder IP were used in Entropic’s 40-nanometre set-top box SoCs; in 2013 Amphion IP was taped out in the first of Entropic’s new range of set-top box SoCs, code-named Kore3, and was being designed into a range of 28-nanometre set-top box SoCs, the first of which was to include the emerging HEVC/H.265 standard.⁠[13][12]

On February 9, 2015, a separate private limited company named Amphion Semiconductor Ltd was incorporated in Northern Ireland (company number NI629219), registered under information technology consultancy activities.⁠[14]

In August 2017 the Belfast company, which had completed a management buyout in 2015, was led by chief executive Stephen Farson; its video codec technology decoded and displayed ultra-high-definition video on digital TVs and was also used in set-top boxes, automotive infotainment, drones, surveillance and virtual reality. Invest Northern Ireland offered £69,000 towards five new engineering jobs.⁠[15]

Allegro DVT, a video codec IP and compliance test company based in Grenoble, France, announced the acquisition of Amphion Semiconductor; the combined company would operate under the Allegro DVT brand from offices in Grenoble and Belfast, and financial terms were not disclosed. Amphion then offered video decoder IP supporting AV1, VP9 and HEVC/H.265 at up to 4Kp60, and described its team as engineers who had worked together for many years on video codec solutions for set-top box and digital TV SoCs.⁠[16]

The company was renamed Allegro DVT UK Ltd in March 2022. On April 21, 2022, another company named Amphion Semiconductor Ltd was incorporated in Northern Ireland (company number NI687584), also with a registered office at Linden House, Beechill Business Park, Belfast.⁠[14][17]

Amphion’s IP platforms included wireless LAN baseband processors (IEEE 802.11a, HIPERLAN), DVB subsystems for cable, satellite and terrestrial digital TV, JPEG, JPEG2000, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and H.264 video and imaging codecs, and lower-level cores such as 2D wavelet processors, parameterisable FFTs, FIR and IIR filters, and Reed-Solomon and Viterbi decoders. Its major customers included IntelIntelIntel is a semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore in 1968; it introduced the 4004 microprocessor in 1971, its x86 processors have long powered personal computers, it has pursued a foundry strategy since 2021, and Lip-Bu Tan has been its chief executive officer since 2025.Open the full entry, Toshiba, MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry, BroadcomBroadcomBroadcom is a semiconductor and infrastructure software company headquartered in Palo Alto, United States, with the ticker symbol AVGO. Its corporate history includes the merger of Avago and the former Broadcom Corporation, as well as acquisitions including CA Technologies, Symantec’s Enterprise Security business, and VMware.Open the full entry, Hitachi, Panasonic, NEC, Sony, Alcatel, Ericsson, Siemens and Mitsubishi, and it had strategic partnerships with the FPGA companies Xilinx and Altera.⁠[12]

Since 2008, encoders and decoders based on this work have been incorporated into all DTV/HDTV SoCs produced by Conexant, NXP, Trident Microsystems and Entropic, and at least 150 million chips worldwide have been manufactured incorporating the technology.⁠[12]

Amphion’s technology came from research at Queen’s University Belfast by John McCanny’s group on silicon architectures and design methods for digital signal and video processing, with the underpinning research carried out from 1993 to 2004. Researchers Yi Hu, Jill Hunter, Shahid Masud and J. Sun later joined Amphion, where Yi Hu became chief silicon architect and chief technologist.⁠[12]

QUBISQUBISQUBIS is the commercialisation and spin-out investment company of Queen’s University Belfast, founded in 1984 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom. It forms and holds stakes in university spin-out companies; Queen’s spin-outs that have listed on the London Stock Exchange include Kainos, Andor Technology and Fusion Antibodies.Open the full entry lists Amphion among its success stories.⁠[18]

J. G. (James) Doherty led the company from its founding until its acquisition in 2004, and Stephen Farson was vice president of engineering in 2002 and 2004.⁠[9][4][6]