Conexant

» see conexant.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Through the dial-up years in Turkey, the brand printed on a modem's box and the name Windows reported for the same device were rarely the same word. The box said whatever the assembler was called. The driver string very often said Conexant, or said Rockwell, which after January 1999 was the same silicon wearing a new company name. That gap between the two labels is the entire story of this company.

Rockwell International incorporated its semiconductor division as Rockwell Semiconductor Systems in 1996 and spun it off as Conexant Systems on 4 January 1999, listed on NASDAQ as CNXT with Dwight W. Decker as chief executive. On the day it went public it was the largest standalone communications chip company in the world, run out of Newport Beach, California. The inherited business was enormous and almost invisible: Rockwell's semiconductor unit had been supplying something like eighty percent of the chips inside fax machines, and it held the same kind of position in PC modems.

The ending took six years and three steps. Golden Gate Capital took the company private in February 2011 at $2.40 a share. In February 2013 it went into Chapter 11 in the Delaware bankruptcy court, citing debt from its own late-1990s acquisition spree and the revenue it lost when Eastman Kodak went bankrupt, and it came out that July as a smaller company headquartered in Irvine. Synaptics completed its acquisition of Conexant Systems, LLC on 26 July 2017, in a deal reported at about $346.7 million. By November conexant.com no longer resolved.

~ the dossier ~

~ hsf and hcf ~

Conexant did not sell modems. It sold the part of a modem that does the work, and its two best-known designs moved progressively more of that work off the card and onto the computer. HCF was a controllerless PCI modem, which kept the signal processing in silicon but handed the control logic to the host. HSF went further and did the signal processing on the host CPU as well, which is why the whole family picked up the name softmodem and the reputation that came with it. The hardware got cheaper every year and the tax landed somewhere else, on your processor during a download and on anyone who tried to boot Linux and discovered the driver was a binary blob or simply did not exist.

~ the pieces it sold ~

For a company with an eighteen-year run, Conexant spent a remarkable proportion of it dismantling itself. In March 2002 it put its wafer fab into a joint venture with The Carlyle Group called Jazz Semiconductor. That June it spun off the wireless division, which merged on the way out with Alpha Industries to become Skyworks Solutions. In June 2003 the internet infrastructure business left as Mindspeed Technologies. In 2004 it merged with GlobespanVirata and kept its own name.

The disposals kept going after that. Broadband media processing went to NXP in April 2008 and Jazz went to Tower Semiconductor that September. The broadband access line followed, to Ikanos, in August 2009. Skyworks is a multi-billion dollar public company today, and Mindspeed was eventually bought by M/A-COM Technology Solutions.

~ the keylogger ~

On 11 May 2017 security researchers reported that Conexant's audio driver was writing every keystroke a user typed into an unencrypted file on the local disk. It was not a leak to a server and there is no evidence anyone collected it, which is the generous reading. The ungenerous one is that a debug feature shipped to production and sat there, logging passwords to a predictable path, on a large number of HP laptops that happened to use Conexant audio hardware.

The timing is the part that sticks. The disclosure landed eleven weeks before Synaptics closed the purchase. The company's last appearance in the general technology press under its own name was not a product launch or a set of results, it was a story about a driver that quietly kept a copy of everything.

~ what synaptics bought ~

By 2017 the modem business was long past relevance and Conexant had reinvented itself around far-field voice, the microphone processing that lets a device across the room hear you over its own speaker. LG put its voice input chip into a set-top box and an IoT hub in February 2016, and Qualcomm integrated the AudioSmart software into its Hexagon DSP a month later. In December 2016 Conexant and Amazon jointly announced a two-microphone development kit for building Alexa devices. A company that spent its first decade helping computers talk to each other over telephone lines spent its last one helping them listen to people, and Synaptics bought it seven months after that pivot finally looked like it was working.

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