The latest is social media company Facebook, which has turned from acquisition plans to an agreement just to buy all the augmented reality displays made by Plessey over the next several years.
In December 1985, General Electric launched a takeover bid for the forerunning conglomerate, Plessey, which had been active in areas from defence to telecoms as well as electronics, only to see the US bid rejected by the UK’s competition authority. The pivots and developments that led to Facebook’s agreement are long and equally interesting in showing how research and commercial decisions combine to form cutting-edge technology for use in unexpected ways.
The Plessey semiconductor business is more than 50 years old, though the current company was created in 2010 through the management buyout of Germany-based semiconductor manufacturer X-Fab’s UK business for an undisclosed amount, in a deal backed by restructuring firm Greybull Capital, which is run by Marc Meyohas.
Back in 2012, Intel Capital also sealed a share warrant agreement with Plessey, agreeing to buy an undisclosed number of shares as a part of wider licensing agreement whereby Plessey would manufacture, sell and support a select number of products in Intel Corporation’s digital tuner portfolio.
Plessey subsequently repositioned itself later that year towards light technology, having acquired the rights from University of Cambridge spinout CamGaN to develop gallium nitride (GaN) as a replacement for silicon in the production of semiconductor power devices. (CamGaN was backed by Cambridge Enterprises, and Andrew Lynn, chief executive of CamGaN, subsequently went on to be CEO of another Cambridge spinout, Fluidic Analytics, which raised $31m at the end of 2018.)
In 2017, just after a £60m venture capital and debt round, Plessey pivoted the focus of the business to the research, development and manufacturing of micro light-emitting diodes (microLEDs) as a display technology for use in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). Honoured at the CES Innovation Awards in March 2019, Plessey has developed a form of GaN-on-silicon technology – which natively emits blue light – that is capable of also emitting native green light from the same semiconductor wafer.
Plessey’s microLED displays produce what it calls “very high-brightness, low-power and high-frame-rate image sources” for AR/VR headsets, and it has been working with Vuzix to develop AR smart glasses. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has said AR and VR is the company’s “next big bet,” had paid $3bn to acquire headset maker Oculus VR in 2014.
Facebook most recently acquired Scape Technologies, another UK-based startup which is focusing on building a computer vision-based positioning system capable of precisely determining the location of any camera device with more accuracy than a global positioning system (GPS).
Analyst Patrick Moorhead told SiliconAngle: “Facebook missed the market for deep integration with smartphones, which is one reason it got an early start in AR by buying Oculus. Therefore, I’m not surprised by this deal with Plessey.”
Given Apple and Samsung’s reported interest in Plessey, others could well end up sniffing around startups west of the London-Oxford-Cambridge triangle that has thrived since Silicon Valley pioneer Fairchild Semiconductor located a design office in Bristol in 1972.
This cluster in the south-west of the UK has been supported by the world’s number one university business accelerator, SetSquared, which is presenting startups from five local universities at the GCV Symposium and its Digital Forum.
