Intersil Corporation is an American company that specializes in the design, development and manufacturing of high-performance analog semiconductors for four high-growth markets — Communications, Computing, High End Consumer and Industrial.

Company history

Intersil’s roots were planted with Radiation Incorporated in 1950, General Electric

General Electric

General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...

 Solid State in 1954 and RCA

RCA

RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...

 Solid State in 1956 and Intersil, Inc in 1967. Those companies eventually came together as Harris Semiconductor in 1988. Harris spun off its entire semiconductor division in 1999 and Intersil was re-born with the largest IPO in American semiconductor industry history. Intersil has focused on growth and opportunities in the “pure-play,” high-performance analog semiconductor market.

Intersil's discrete power business was purchased for $338M in 2001 by Fairchild Semiconductor, leaving Intersil to focus on its other businesses.

In February 2008, Richard M. Beyer

Richard M. Beyer

-Early life and Career:Beyer served three years as an officer in the United States Marine Corps. He holds a BS and MS from Georgetown University and an MBA from Columbia Business School....

 resigned as CEO to pursue another opportunity and was succeeded by Dave Bell, who soon after restructured the company from five divisions to two.

Intersil acquired fabless semiconductor company

Fabless semiconductor company

A fabless semiconductor company specializes in the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing the fabrication or "fab" of the devices to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry...

 Techwell

Techwell

Techwell is an American fabless semiconductor company that develops chips for video devices such as video recorders, automobile dashboards, rearview mirrors, and rear-seat LCD screens. The company is based in San Jose, California and has 200 employees. Techwell was acquired by Intersil on March...

 for US$370 million on March 22, 2010.

Products

Some of the many end applications in which Intersil analog IC

Ic

IC, ic, or i.c. may stand for:In computing and technology:* .ic.gov, a second-level domain name administered by the US Government for members of the intelligence community* Integrated circuit* Initial condition...

s can be found include desktop and notebook PCs, cell phones, portable media players and other handheld devices, video distribution systems, video displays, medical equipment, military and space electronics, and industrial systems. Intersil has 47 product families whose products include amplifiers, analog front ends, communication interfaces, data converters, digital potentiometers, display solutions, DSL solutions, optical storage

Optical storage

Optical storage is a term from engineering referring to the storage of data on an optically readable medium. Data is recorded by making marks in a pattern that can be read back with the aid of light, usually a beam of laser light precisely focused on a spinning disc. An older example, that does...

 products, power management products, power sequencers, real time clocks, battery management ICs, switches/MUX

Mux

mux was a windowing system developed by Rob Pike at Bell Labs for the Ninth Edition Research Unix. mux is a predecessor of the Plan 9 windowing systems 8½ and rio, which retain its minimalist user interface.-External links :*...

's, VoIP products and harsh environment ICs for mining, military, space and radiation hardened applications.

A creation of Intersil (as Harris Semiconductor) is the PRISM

PRISM (chipset)

PRISM wireless networking solutions are a family of Conexant chipsets used for Wireless LANs, and were formerly produced by Intersil Corporation.- Legacy 802.11b products :...

line of Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi or Wifi, is a mechanism for wirelessly connecting electronic devices. A device enabled with Wi-Fi, such as a personal computer, video game console, smartphone, or digital audio player, can connect to the Internet via a wireless network access point. An access point has a range of about 20...

 hardware: that group of products was sold to GlobespanVirata in 2003, and is currently maintained by Conexant

Conexant

Conexant Systems, Inc. is an American semiconductor company, formerly the semiconductor division of Rockwell International. Currently it's privately owned by Golden Gate Capital, an equity firm headquartered in San Francisco.-History:...

. Intersil is the present manufacturer of the RCA (CDP)1802

RCA 1802

The RCA CDP1802, also known as the COSMAC , is an 8-bit CMOS microprocessor introduced by RCA in early 1976. It is being by Intersil Corporation as a high-reliability microprocessor...

 microprocessor

Microprocessor

A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...

 (aka RCA COSMAC), a CPU

Central processing unit

The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...

traditionally much used in space applications.