C-Cube Microsystems

~ the last words ~

Nobody ever bought a C-Cube. You bought a VideoCD player in 1996 or one of the first DVD machines, and a C-Cube part did the decoding somewhere inside it, which is why a company this important to the 1990s left no consumer memory at all. VideoCD was never a Turkish format either. What arrived here was VHS and then DVD, with the silicon layer completely invisible from the outside.

C-Cube Microsystems was founded on 8 August 1988 by Edmund Sun, who came out of Weitek, and Alexandre Balkanski. Early money came from Hambrecht & Quist and JAFCO America Ventures, with the Japanese farm equipment maker Kubota also in the round. Digital video was still a research argument at that point: everyone could see that moving pictures would go digital, and nobody could move that much data without compressing it first.

The advantage was not silicon at first. Eric Hamilton of C-Cube chaired the JPEG committee and Didier LeGall chaired the MPEG video committee, so the people writing the standards and the people implementing them in hardware sat at the same tables. Both standards landed in the early 1990s, and C-Cube already had parts for them.

Technical leadership took years to become money. Bill O'Meara arrived as chief executive in 1991, hired a professional management team and raised another $10 million at the end of 1992. Sequoia Capital led it. Texas Instruments and AMD came in alongside. The product line that followed is the one that mattered. The CL550 did JPEG and the CL450 did MPEG-1 decoding, while a prototype called the CL950 pointed at MPEG-2.

C-Cube listed on Nasdaq in 1994 under the ticker CUBE, with Don Valentine of Sequoia as chairman. Its two real markets arrived immediately after. The CL4000 encoder family fed the DirecTV satellite launch from Hughes, and the CL480 decoder drove the VideoCD market across Japan and China in the mid 1990s.

~ the record ~

~ the split ~

By the late 1990s there were two companies under one name. DiviCom, a video compression systems business Balkanski had incubated from 1993 and bought outright in 1996, sold equipment to broadcasters. The semiconductor side sold parts to Asian manufacturers by the million. O'Meara retired in 1995 and Balkanski took the chief executive seat; Umesh Padval was brought in to run the chip half from 1998.

In May 2000 the systems half went to Harmonic Lightwaves for a figure reported at close to $1.7 billion. The SEC's own filing record shows what happened to the rest: the registrant filed as C-Cube Semiconductor Inc. until 29 December 1999 and as C-Cube Microsystems Inc. after that date. Once the boxes were sold off, the chip business carried the original name again.

~ the exchange offer ~

LSI Logic signed an Agreement and Plan of Reorganization on 26 March 2001 and ran the purchase in two steps. The first was an exchange offer of 0.79 of an LSI share for each C-Cube share. It closed with roughly 43.6 million shares tendered, about 86 percent of the company, and LSI announced that majority on 11 May 2001. The second step merged a subsidiary named Clover Acquisition Corp into C-Cube, issuing another 9,302,521 LSI shares for everything that had not been tendered and reserving about 10.6 million more against outstanding options.

LSI's press release of 11 June 2001 is the death certificate. It announced the completion of an $851 million acquisition by exchange offer and subsequent merger, and C-Cube became a wholly owned subsidiary of a company best known for custom logic chips.

~ what happened to the silicon ~

LSI held the consumer products business for six years and sold it to Magnum Semiconductor in 2007. The parts outlived the brand in the ordinary way, inside set top boxes and DVD recorders whose owners had no reason to know who made the decoder.

The standards outlived everything. JPEG is still what a photograph is and MPEG is still what a video file is, and for the few years when those two questions were being settled, the chairs at both committee tables were occupied by engineers from a company in Milpitas that no longer exists.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »