Reverse Engineering Companies Merge

EETimes: United Business Media Ltd., the publisher of EE Times, has acquired for at least $8M Sanguine Microelectronics, a semiconductor reverse engineering company based in Shanghai. UBM will merge Sanguine into its existing Semiconductor Insights (SI) group in Ottawa that provides chip and patent analysis services. The deal also includes possible payments of up to $9.5M to the Shanghai company over three years if the company meets unspecified business targets.

The deal nearly double's SI's headcount and expands its lab capabilities. Sanguine employs about 130 people with a lab in Shanghai and an office in France and has annual revenues of about $4 million. SI has about 160 employees with labs in Ottawa and Warsaw and sales offices in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China, Europe and Israel.

Both companies published a lot of reverse engineering reports on image sensors, albeit their recent focus seems to shift elsewhere.