Shih founded the fabless ASIC house 12 years ago. He will remain on the board. No replacement was named.

For the first nine months of 2009, Global Unichip's sales were $185.9 million, compared to $217.3 million a year ago. Net income for the period was $10.4 million, compared to $18.1 million a year ago.

Revenue for October was down 7 percent month-over-month and down 14 percent year-over-year.

Global Unichip works hand-in-hand with its largest shareholder, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC). Global Unichip provides various ASIC and IC design services. The devices in turn are produced in TSMC's fabs.

Earlier this month, Global Unichip rolled out an ARM7-based GP5080 series solid state disk (SSD) platform solution, targeting the storage application for the netbook, smartbook and other portable consumer markets.

There are two different lineups in this series. The GP5080 is optimized for cost-sensitive applications by removing the need for external DRAM cache. The GP5086 supports DRAM cache.

Global Unichip also rolled out a surveillance system-on-a-chip (SoC) design solutions capable of 4 channel concurrent encode/decode in real time D1 format. The GP1680 design solution is based on an SoC platform, targeting the fast growing markets of home security and public surveillance.