LONDON — Elixent Ltd., a company spun out from the research laboratories of Hewlett Packard Co. in Bristol, England, has been acquired by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., one of its two principal backers according to an online report. Elixent is set to become an R&D center under the Panasonic name, the report said.
Elixent was spun off from Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Bristol in 2000 to commercialize reconfigurable technology that had been in development there since 1995. Alan Marshall served as chief technology officer of the company under Kenn Lamb, chief executive officer.
Elixent's FPGA-like programmable fabric, which was intended to be integrated with software-programmable processors, attracted engineering interest in the first half of the decade. It also attracted investment rounds worth $14 million in Oct. 2000 and $10 million in July 2003.
However, attracting customers proved hard and Elixent did much of its development work with just two companies; Toshiba and Matsushita. These two helped out existing investors 3i, GIMV and NIF Ventures in a third funding round worth $15 million in April 2005. However, later that year Elixent laid off most of its sales and marketing staff.
Matsushita has plans to use the Elixent technology across a range of Panasonic branded products, the report said.
RSS
RSS| 
Digital| 
Mobile
