Lantiq

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

~ the goodbye ~

Infineon announced in July 2009 that it was selling its wireline communications division, and by August it had a name for what the buyer would get: Lantiq. Golden Gate Capital completed the purchase on 6 November 2009 for a final price the firm put at approximately 243 million euros, and the thing that walked out of Infineon's Neubiberg campus was a fabless chip company with about 900 employees and a product line already installed at carriers around the world. Christian Wolff ran it. Deutsche Telekom's venture arm took a stake the following spring.

Intel announced on 2 February 2015 that it would buy the company. The release said deal terms were not disclosed and that the transaction was expected to close in approximately 90 days, and it put the installed base at more than 100 global operators. The price surfaced later in Intel's own accounts rather than in any announcement: the 10-K records the acquisition "in the second quarter of 2015 for net cash consideration of $345 million", while the quarterly filing for that period gives an acquisition-date cash consideration of $383 million. Neither document explains the gap between the two.

Intel's filings never name a day. The trade press does: EE Times reported that Intel announced the closing on Thursday 16 April 2015, and the staff went into a newly created Connected Home Division. Nothing was said about the name, and no source since gives a date for retiring it. Lantiq was a brand sold to equipment makers rather than to people, so its whole public surface was a set of datasheets, and the datasheets changed letterhead.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a third of the ports ~

The market position was remarkable for a company nobody outside the industry had heard of. Writing in March 2010, TechCrunch called Lantiq the second largest fabless semiconductor company in Europe with revenue of just over $450 million in 2009, and cited iSuppli's third-quarter 2009 numbers for the figure that mattered: Lantiq shipped 34 percent of all xDSL ports worldwide. One vendor in a Munich suburb, a third of the world's copper broadband.

The products carried the XWAY name, and the two families worth knowing are the GRX gateway processors and the VRX line that did the actual DSL work. They were systems-on-chip, meaning the router, the switch, the wireless controller and the modem all lived on one piece of silicon instead of four, which is the integration that let carriers hand the finished boxes out for nothing.

If you want to see what Lantiq was for, look at a German FRITZ!Box. AVM announced in October 2013 that it had selected a Lantiq system-on-chip to power the FRITZ!Box 7490, its flagship VDSL2 gateway, and the release noted that the VRX family was already shipping in high volume. In Germany the FRITZ!Box is a household object with opinions attached to it, the router people actually choose, and for several generations the thing inside it came from Lantiq.

~ the box it lived in ~

Turkey got the same technology with none of that visibility. The ADSL modem arrived from the phone company, in the phone company's box, with the phone company's sticker across the front, and whatever silicon was underneath was not information anyone was offered. I had broadband at home from around 2006 and could not have named a single chip in the thing. That is the normal relationship between a person and a modem, and it is why a company shipping a third of the world's DSL ports can disappear without anyone noticing.

Dan Artusi replaced Wolff as chief executive in May 2012 and then ran Intel's Connected Home Division after the sale, so the leadership carried straight over into the buyer. The product line kept moving as well. Intel sold its Home Gateway Platform Division to MaxLinear in an asset deal worth $150 million in cash, completed on 3 August 2020, which put the old Lantiq parts under their third owner in eleven years.

They are still for sale. MaxLinear lists the GRX350 and GRX550 today under its own AnyWAN family, same part numbers doing the same job, and the word Lantiq appears nowhere on those product pages. The part number is the only thing from Neubiberg that is still in print.

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