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Nuvia

Semiconductors · Santa Clara, United States · Founded 2019

Nuvia Inc. emerged in early 2019 as a semiconductor design company with a mission to redefine silicon for an era of exponentially growing data. The company was founded in Santa Clara, California, by a trio of esteemed semiconductor industry veterans: Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati, and John Bruno. This founding team brought together a formidable depth of experience from senior engineering roles at Apple, Google, ARM, AMD, and Broadcom, collectively holding over 100 patents in silicon design. The founders' backgrounds were central to Nuvia's strategy. Gerard Williams III, who served as CEO, was the chief architect for all of Apple's CPU and System on a Chip (SoC) development for nearly a decade, leading the design of every processor core from the A7 to the A12X. Manu Gulati was a lead SoC architect at Google and previously spent eight years at Apple working on the chips that power iPhones and iPads. John Bruno, a systems architect at Google and formerly with Apple's platform architecture group, founded Apple's silicon competitive analysis team. Nuvia's business was centered on designing high-performance, power-efficient custom CPU cores and SoCs for the data center market. The company aimed to deliver a significant step-up in performance and energy efficiency to challenge incumbents in the server processor space. Their first-generation custom ARM-based CPU core was codenamed 'Phoenix', which was to be integrated into an SoC named 'Orion'. Nuvia's business model involved licensing its custom CPU designs to clients in the data center and high-performance computing markets. The company secured significant funding, raising $53 million in a Series A round in November 2019 and a further $240 million in a Series B round in September 2020. The company's trajectory took a sharp turn in March 2021 when it was acquired by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. for $1.4 billion, less than two years after its inception. The acquisition marked Qualcomm's return to custom CPU design, with the intent to integrate Nuvia's high-performance CPU designs across its product portfolio, including flagship smartphones, next-generation laptops, digital cockpits, and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Following the acquisition, the Nuvia team, including its three founders, joined Qualcomm to lead these new CPU development efforts. Keywords: CPU design, system on a chip, SoC, semiconductor, data center processors, high-performance computing, ARM architecture, silicon design, power efficiency, custom CPU, Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati, John Bruno, Qualcomm, Phoenix core, Orion SoC, server chips, CPU performance, mobile processors, automotive components