PA Semi

P.A. Semi, originally founded as Palo Alto Semiconductor in 2003, was a fabless semiconductor company that carved a significant niche in the design of powerful and power-efficient processors. The company was established in Santa Clara, California, by Daniel W. Dobberpuhl, a prominent engineer renowned for his lead design work on the DEC Alpha and StrongARM processors. Dobberpuhl's extensive background at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), where he led the design of multiple groundbreaking CPUs, and his experience co-founding and selling another startup, SiByte, to Broadcom, provided a deep reservoir of expertise for this new venture.

The company assembled a formidable 150-person engineering team that included other industry veterans like Jim Keller, who had an impressive track record at AMD and DEC, contributing to processors such as the Itanium and Opteron. This collection of talent focused on creating processors based on the Power ISA architecture, an area that had been dominated by the AIM alliance (Apple, IBM, Motorola). P.A. Semi's business model was fabless, meaning it concentrated purely on the design and engineering of semiconductors, while planning to outsource the actual manufacturing, with investor Texas Instruments being a likely fabrication partner. Its primary product was the PWRficient family of processors, designed from the ground up to deliver high performance with low power consumption. The flagship PWRficient PA6T-1682M processor, a 64-bit dual-core chip, was noted for consuming just 5 to 13 watts at 2 gigahertz, a significant efficiency gain over comparable chips at the time.

Initially, P.A. Semi targeted the embedded systems and high-performance computing markets, including networking equipment, after a potential major deal with Apple was sidelined by Apple's strategic shift from PowerPC to Intel processors for its Macintosh computers. Despite this setback, the company began shipping its PWRficient processors to select customers in 2007. The company's trajectory took a decisive turn in April 2008 when Apple Inc. acquired it for $278 million in cash. The acquisition was not for P.A. Semi's existing Power ISA chips but for its world-class engineering team. Steve Jobs confirmed that the purpose was to bring this exceptional talent in-house to develop custom silicon for Apple's mobile devices, a strategic move that proved foundational for the development of the A-series processors used in the iPhone, iPad, and other products.

Keywords: P.A. Semi, fabless semiconductor, PWRficient, Power ISA, Dan Dobberpuhl, Jim Keller, Apple acquisition, low-power processors, high-performance computing, system-on-a-chip, CPU design, processor architecture, DEC Alpha, StrongARM, embedded systems, custom silicon, A-series processors, semiconductor engineering, Palo Alto Semiconductor