DSP Group Acquires Teleman for $5M

DSP Group Inc. today acquired substantially all of the assets of Teleman Multimedia Inc. for $5 million in cash.

The acquisition provides the Santa Clara, Calif.-based wireless systems provider with a silicon platform for video compression and decompression designed to interface with image

DSP Group has acquired all the intellectual property of Alviso, Calif.-based Teleman, including patents and other research and development in process. DSP Group has also hired John Hong, Teleman’s founder, CEO and CTO, as VP for video technologies. The company said it has also hired other key Teleman engineers in Seoul and Alviso.

“DSP Group plans to build a new team of 40 designers around the group from Teleman,” said Eli Ayalon, chairman and CEO of DSP Group, in a statement. “This team will integrate the Teleman and DSP Group technologies to create new products to meet the developing market demand for video features. The first product integrating the Teleman technology has been defined and has secured one design win. Shipments of this product are expected to begin in the third quarter of 2004. We expect the sales of the company in the fourth quarter of 2004 enriched with the new video products, to show a 30 percent increase compared to our forecast for the fourth quarter of 2003.”

The Teleman silicon platform supports the MPEG4, JPEG and H263 compression standards and is currently being adapted to also support H264, which allows improved video quality at low bit rates.