SUNNYVALE, CA — January 22nd, 2009 - Maxim Integrated Products (NASDAQ: MXIM) announces today that it has acquired Innova Card, a privately held, fabless semiconductor company whose focus is advanced secure microcontroller technology for financial terminals. The transaction bolsters Maxim’s presence in the $350M financial transaction terminal semiconductor market.
Maxim products, such as the DS5002 secure microcontroller, pioneered the development and use of silicon for secure transaction terminals with innovative encryption techniques for protecting application code, custom-designed environmental sensors to enhance a terminal’s physical security, secure cryptographic hardware accelerators to ensure transaction integrity, and battery-backed nonvolatile zeroizing SRAM for secret key storage. Maxim’s broad product offering makes it the most well-rounded silicon provider for the financial terminal market, providing not only secure ICs, but also advanced power-management, communication interface, and wireless communication ICs.
Innova Card has developed a highly integrated, secure 32-bit MIPS microcontroller and a precertified POS terminal reference design. In addition, they supply advanced customer support tools, including secure software libraries and a secure implementation of the Linux® operating system. Innova Card has reduced the POS terminal design cycle time from 24 months to 6 months, substantially reducing the R&D burden and risk for the many companies that want to enter the POS terminal market.
Maxim’s acquisition of Innova Card augments the Company’s secure transaction product portfolio, which offers superior secure microcontrollers, advanced application support, and a complete set of analog ICs to connect the real world to the digital world.
Maxim Division Vice President Chris Neil commented, “Financial institutions, businesses, and governments all want to move from cash transactions to electronic financial transactions for convenience, efficiency, and accountability reasons. Innova Card’s open platform, based on their 32-bit secure microcontroller and precertified reference design, will open the market to dozens of terminal makers, lowering implementation costs and accelerating the growth of the electronic transaction market throughout the world.”
Innova Card CEO David Graziani said, “We are excited to join the Maxim family. Maxim’s acquisition confirms our vision that an open yet secure platform provides the best option for acceleration of the worldwide transition from cash to electronic payments.”
Don Loomis, Executive Director of the Microcontroller Business Unit at Maxim, commented, “The addition of Innova Card to Maxim gives us a great strategic position to stay ahead of increasing security and performance requirements brought by the new PCI-PED 2.0 security standard. Furthermore, it provides an excellent means to increase the penetration of all of Maxim’s silicon offerings in the secure transactions market.”
About Maxim Integrated Products
Maxim Integrated Products is a publicly traded company that designs, manufactures, and sold over $2 billion of high-performance semiconductor products in its fiscal year 2008. Maxim was founded over 25 years ago with the mission to deliver innovative analog and mixed-signal engineering solutions that add value to its customers' products. To date, Maxim has developed over 5,800 products in 28 product categories serving the Industrial, Communications, Consumer, and Computing markets. For more information, go to www.maxim-ic.com.