ATI acquires Bitboys

ATI has acquired privately held Bitboys Oy, a 15-year veteran of the graphics industry for up to EUR 35.2 million (about US$44 million). The final value is subject to certain performance-related conditions. Bitboys brings valuable engineering experience, technology and customer relationships that enhance ATI's existing mobile phone multimedia offerings. Based in Finland, the Bitboys team will be fully integrated in to ATI's Handheld Business Unit, and form the nucleus for a key design centre for ATI in Europe.

ATI is well-known in the mobile phone industry for providing high-performance graphics and multimedia solutions; this acquisition enhances ATI's product portfolio with a number of technologies, including OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics and OpenVG 1.0 2D vector graphics technologies optimized for high-volume mainstream mobile phones. These graphics cores will be supported by ATI's common software stack which covers its complete range of multimedia co-processors. This unified software environment allows developers to easily create content for a range of devices and offers mobile phone manufacturers faster time to market.

"ATI gives us what we need to reach the next level," said Mikko Saari, CEO, Bitboys. "Their market presence and ability to sell our products as part of a complete multimedia lineup will prove incredibly valuable to us. It's a classic win-win, realizing value for both companies."

"Bitboys dovetails into ATI perfectly," said Paul Dal Santo, GM of ATI's Handheld Business Unit. "Handsets are transitioning to hardware acceleration for graphics and multimedia, and the Bitboys team will play a critical role as we drive this key inflection point to make ATI the platform of choice for content providers."

Vector graphics is a vital component of a multimedia product lineup as it will become the standard for creating user interfaces on mobile devices. It's a very compact format that allows more graphics to be stored on a phone and for content to be distributed much more efficiently over mobile networks. In addition, vector graphics content automatically scales to any screen resolution so developers can deliver content across a range of devices without reworking all of the art assets.