Global Silicon

Global Silicon was founded in Cambridge, UK[4] by engineer Martin Brennan. Initially the company was called "The Cheap & Cheerful Chip Company Limited".[5][6] Brennan was joined by engineer Morgan Colmer in 1998. Together Brennan and Colmer developed an FPGA based demonstration for a new CD player IC that integrated the functions of several system ICs into one system-on-a-chip (SoC). After successfully raising £2 million (GBP) from investment firm MTI[7][8] in 1999, the company went on to turn the demonstration system into an ASIC. The company changed its name to Global Silicon prior to the first round of investment. In 2005, Global Silicon received further investment of £5.7 million (GBP) from a consortium of investors made up of MTI, Quester and Celtic House.[9][10][11]

• William Jeffrey served as CEO and Chairman from the initial investment in 1999 until he took a leave of absence in 2006 following being diagnosed with terminal cancer.[12]
• Martin Brennan served as Managing Director until he left Global Silicon in 2001 to form a new audio company called 3GA.[13]
• Morgan Colmer served as the CTO for the company until 2006 and then participated in the management buy out of company assets and from 2007 has served as the Managing Director.
• David Leith served as the CEO of the company from 2003 until 2004.
• Steve Cliff served as Sales and Marketing Director from 2004 to 2005.
• Andrew Hamer served as Sales and Marketing Director from 2002 to 2003.
• Nick Rich served as CFO from December 2004 to October 2006, then served as Managing Director until December 2006.

Global Silicon produced 6 different ICs with varying degrees of success. All of the semiconductor products are now discontinued.

Global Silicon's initial products focussed on the Compact Disc player market and one of the key pieces of technology that was created on the Xin-Core platform, was a complete CD player including servo, data decoder and audio player. Upon this base, the company also created their own hand-crafted implementations of MP3 and WMA decoders. Additional DSP effects were created as was a User Interface (UI) layer that could easily be customised for the majority of consumer audio applications. Patents created by the company were:

• Digital audio processing[15]
• Driver circuit for a liquid crystal display[16]
• Radio receiver[17]
  • Divisional filing for above relating to novel demodulation technique
• Method for cancelling a beat frequency in a radio receiver
• De-bouncing Circuit[18]
• Replaying digital media[19]
• Sigma-delta modulator[20]
• Random number generator[21]
• Flash memory error correction[22]
• A sigma delta modulator utilizing feedback loop and logic circuit[23]
• A network set-up device[24]
• Radio tuner user interface[25]

In December 2006, the board decided to close the business and a buyer was sought for the IP, stock and assets. The investors cited "investment in Global Silicon was written off following its failure to get significant sales traction despite having a proven product".[2] It is also self-evident that the loss of the company's Chairman, William Jeffrey due to cancer[26] will have factored in the decision process. The timing of the closure was also at a pivotal point in the consumer audio market, with Compact Disc equipment sales falling and being replaced with products such as the iPod.[27][28] The company's extensive patent portfolio was sold separately.

In January 2007, the company CTO, Morgan Colmer, purchased from the administrators the intellectual property (IP), stock and assets of the company including a Hong Kong subsidiary. All assets and intellectual property were then transferred to the subsidiary company (of the same name) and has operated since as a consulting business in Asia.

• Official website
• Xin processor gets ready for tape-out
• Rega CD Players that are currently available that use the Xin IC inside