October 30, 2022
will add its employees to the developer team of the former DSPG company, which it acquired in August 2021. The Israeli technologies are designed to provide smart image processing and voice processing capabilities to Synaptics’ end processors
About a year after she purchased her company DSPG Maherzliya for about 450 million dollars, is now purchasing Synaptics From California the company Emza Visual Sense from Givatayim, which provides image sensors that operate at very low power. The Emza company was founded in 2003 by Dr. Zeev Smilansky, Eitan Ramati and Yossi Givati. The company has developed tiny image sensors from the WiseEye family that include computer vision algorithms, for the “Always on Sensors” (AoS – Always on Sensors) market.
Amza was purchased in April 2018 by Himax Technologies The Taiwanese company Fabless manufactures sensors, display processors, drives and timing controllers for consumer electronic products, computers, and vehicle navigation displays. After the deal, Amza continued to operate as an independent company owned by Haymax. Following the purchase deal, Haymax developed image processing solutions for peripherals based on Amza’s software and an image sensor and ASIC component that Haymax developed according to Amza’s instructions.
The sensor belongs to the tinyML category – low-power artificial intelligence products – and is considered one of the first visual tinyML solutions in the world. In April 2022, the world’s third-largest computer manufacturer, Dell Technologies, decided to integrate Amza’s smart image sensor into all the laptops it will produce from the Latitude, Inspiron and Precision families, to give them the ability to visually identify the user. This is the largest order in the company’s history and thanks to it it was supposed to be profitable this year.
Haymax announced that despite the transfer of Amza to the ownership of Synaptics, the two companies will continue to cooperate, and that this move will not harm the giant’s deal with the Dell company. But this time Amza ceases to be an independent company, and merges into the current activity of Synaptics in Herzliya, i.e. the remaining activity of the DSPG company. Apparently, Amza’s technology will be integrated into Synaptics’ Katana Edge AI platform, which includes hardware and software for edge applications that include image processing and voice processing. The company made a similar move with the purchase of DSPG: it integrated the Israeli company’s sound processing technologies within its Katana platform, which was particularly strong in the field of image processing.
CEO of Synaptics, Salil Awsar, said that Amza’s efficient algorithm is suitable for Synaptics’ processors, which are required to provide great savings in processing loads and power. Although no details were provided on the scope of the deal, Synaptics’ stock on NASDAQ increased by about 4% and is traded according to a market value of about 3.72 billion dollars. Haymax shares on Nasdaq reacted in the opposite way, and fell by about 3%, to a company value of about 1 billion dollars.
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