Large US companies are looking for Technion talent to design custom chips in Israel
[Rani Tamari January 4th, 2024]
Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook all want to set up their own silicon design in Israel’s “Silicon Wadi”.
The Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology in Haifa, is the seed of many chip companies in Israel. Let’s review the history of these companies in the fabless semiconductor industry, and specifically in Israel.
Starting with Technion talent in Haifa
The first company to jump and fetch Technion talent was Intel, which set up shop shop in Haifa in 1974. In 1993, Qualcomm, set up offices to build semiconductor IP cores for their San Diego chips right next to Intel’s Haifa offices. In 2003, Intel released the Pentium M, a SoC (System on chip) which was designed in their Haifa offices.
Apple (Market Cap $2.87T)
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Steve Jobs made it clear that they were buying talent, not IP.
In 2010, Apple’s first in-house chip was announced. It was the 32-bit A4, manufactured by Samsung at 45nm technology, and built into the first iPad and the iPhone4.
In 2012, Apple decided to go deeper into the semiconductor by acquiring Israeli firm Anobit for an estimated $450M.
Apple bought Anobit for two reasons:
1. Flash Memory Controller design. This chip was in most Apple products at the time of acquisition.
2. Talent. Anobit’s engineers in the Herzliya offices provided a 10% boost to the SoC engineering count at Apple.
Under Tim Cook, Apple expanded the Israeli team, and set up a second design center in Haifa, 15-minute drive from the Technion.
Israel is the largest office outside of its headquarters in Cupertino.
In November 2013, Apple acquired Israeli PrimeSense for $360M, and used the technology to develop their Facial Recognition System.
PrimeSense president and founder, Aviad Maizels, is a Technion grad.
PrimeSense was the original SoC vendor for Microsoft’s Kinect.
In 2019, Apple agreed to buy the smartphone modem business unit from Intel for $1B. The acquisition included IP, equipment, and more than 2,000 chip engineers.
In 2020, HW VP Johny Srouji, a Technion graduate, made two announcements:
In June 2020 he announced the transition of the Mac computer from Intel’s x86 CPU architecture to their own Apple SoC.
In December 2020 Apple announced that it is starting to build the first Apple Cellular modem chip.
Apple’s SoC strategic goals are to avoid reliance on Qualcomm for modems and Intel for CPUs.
For that, it needs Israeli SoC talent.
Microsoft (Market Cap $2.75T)
Microsoft Israel was the first R&D center that Microsoft opened outside of Redmond, WA.
Microsoft made the following acquisitions in Israel:
2000: Peach Networks.
2001: Maximal Innovative Intelligence for $20M.
2006: Whale Communication for $75M, led by Technion graduate Elad Baron
2006: Gteko for $110M
2009: SoC company 3DV Systems for $35M.
2010: YaData for an estimated $25M
2014: Aorato for $200M.
2015: Microsoft paid $30M to buy N-Trig, which designed their touchscreen controller.
The N-Trig chip was used in Surface Pro 3 before the acquisition.
In 2019 Microsoft hired Oren Ish-Am from Mellanox to lead the SoC development for Azure.
In July 2023 Microsoft launched a chip for its cloud servers, developed in Israel, which aims to allow it to make adjustments to the Azure cloud system for customers on demand, while saving on the costs of buying chips from external suppliers, such as Nvidia and Intel.
Microsoft's chip development center in Israel, most of which is located in Haifa and has been working for four years on developing hardware technologies for the Azure cloud system.
Although it has been responsible for a small number of products already integrated into Azure, this is the first major launch of a product from the development center.
Amazon (Market Cap $1.53T)
In 2011, three Technion graduates, Avigdor Willenz, Nafea Bashara and Billy Hrvoye, founded Annapurna labs.
All three led Galileo Technologies to a $2.7B acquisition by Marvell Technology.
Galileo’s offices were inside the Technion campus and almost all the employees were Technion graduates.
Avigdor Willenz, Annapurna’s CEO, decided to set up the offices for Annapurna Labs in Yokneam, half an hour drive from the Technion.
In 2015, Amazon’s AWS acquired Annapurna Labs for $370M.
In 2016, AWS announced availability of an Arm-based PCIe Gen3–10GE SoC, designed in Annapurna offices in Israel.
In 2017, AWS announced Annapurna’s Graviton (AL73400), a 16x Arm Cortex-A72 based chip, which was deployed in Amazon EC2 A1 instances.
In 2018, AWS/Annapurna announced the availability of Arm’s Neoverse™-based application servers.
Israeli Annapurna Labs is considered AWS’s secret sauce.
Amazon’s Graviton chips now rival the performance of the Intel chip, marking a potential turning point in the chip industry.
For more on AWS SoC, check out the 2021 article by Timothy Morgan.
Google (Market Cap $1.75T)
Google started silicon design in 2015, when it introduced its first Tenso Processing Unit (TPU) to speed up AI chores in its data centers, aiding functions like real-time voice search, photo object recognition, and interactive language translation.
In July 2018, Google introduced Titan SoC, which was used both by GCP and the Pixel3 phone.
In October 2018, it also introduced Pixel Visual Core (PVC), a series of Arm-based image processors, which appeared first in the Pixel 2 phone.
In March 2021, Amin Vahdat, VP of Google’s System Infrastructure, announced that the company is assembling a “world-class” Israeli SoC team, headed by ex-Intel, Uri Frank, in Tel Aviv.
Frank is a Technion graduate, in TLV
The division managed by Frank is responsible for the development of two processors that are supposed to provide backup for each other in the event of a breakdown.
Both are based on architecture of ARM.
According to The Information, the first processor, codenamed Maple, is based on a design ordered from microchip company Marvell Technology (which also has an Israeli development center).
The second processor, Cypress, is being developed exclusively in Israel.
The two processors are expected to be installed in Google’s servers starting in 2025.
Nvidia (Market Cap $1.17T)
Facebook (Market Cap $885B)
Facebook is the last of these big five to enter the chip industry.
There are rumors that in 2021 Facebook will start building a chip-design
In March 2011, Facebook acquired Israeli firm Snaptu for $70M.
In June 2011, Facebook acquired the Israeli firm Face.com for $100M.
In 2013, Facebook acquired Onavo for an estimated $120M.
In 2015, a year after their $2B acquisition of Oculus, Facebook acquired Pebbles Interfaces for $60M.
In 2018 Facebook recruited Shahriar Rabii, Founder of Google’s Consumer Silicon team.
In May 2023 Facebook announced the following 2 chips (not sure which were designed in Israel)
(1) MTIA (Meta Training and Inference Accelerator):
Custom accelerator chip family targeting inference workloads.
MTIA provides greater compute power and efficiency than CPUs, and it is customized for our internal workloads.
(2) MSVP: Meta’s first ASIC for video transcoding
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