Japan-based electronics company Fujitsu has used its corporate venturing fund to make a strategic investment of undisclosed size in Tensilica, a US-based semiconductor company.
Minoru Sakata, president of the mobile phones unit at Fujitsu, said: "After working with Tensilica on the development of advanced performance on our mobile terminals we realised how important Tensilica’s dataplane processor (DPU) foundation has become to our engineers.
"Tensilica’s customizable DPUs help us get maximum performance with the lowest possible power in high throughput, signal processing-intensive mobile wireless devices."
Jack Guedj, Tensilica’s executive president, said: "We have been working with the best engineers at Fujitsu for over two years as they have been designing their long term evolution products for next-generation mobile phones."
In June last year, Japan’s national phone operator NTT made a similar strategic investment in Tensilica through its Docomo Capital corporate venturing fund.
Tensilica’s last public investment was in mid-1999 when it raised $20m in its series C round, to take total funding to $33m.
Investors at that time were strategic backers Altera, Cisco Systems, Comdisco Ventures, Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, and venture capital firms Foundation Capital, Oak Investment Partners and Worldview Technology Partners.
However news provider VentureWire said Tensilica had raised $89m before Docomo’s investment and the company said its investors now also included strategic Conexant Systems and NEC.