P.A. Semi

P.A. Semi Inc.

Power to Perform
Type	Private subsidiary of Apple Inc.
Industry	Fabless semiconductor company
Fate	acquired by Apple in 2008.
Founded	2003
Founder	Daniel W. Dobberpuhl
Headquarters	Santa Clara, California, United States
Products	PWRficient processor
Owner	Apple Inc.
Number of employees	150 person engineering team
Parent	Apple Inc.
Website	web.archive.org/web/20070927205658/http://www.pasemi.com/

P. A. Semi (originally "Palo Alto Semiconductor") was a fabless semiconductor company founded in Santa Clara, California in 2003 by Daniel W. Dobberpuhl (BS EE 1967 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), who was previously the lead designer for the DEC Alpha 21064 and StrongARM processors. The company employed a 150-person engineering team which included people who had previously worked on processors like Itanium, Opteron and UltraSPARC. Apple Inc acquired P.A. Semi for $278 million in April 2008.

P. A. Semi concentrated on making powerful and power-efficient Power Architecture processors called PWRficient, based on the PA6T processor core. The PA6T was the first Power Architecture core to be designed from scratch outside the AIM alliance (i.e. not by Apple, IBM, or Motorola/Freescale) in ten years. Texas Instruments was one of the investors in P.A. Semi and it was suggested that their fabrication plants would be used to manufacture the PWRficient processors.

PWRficient processors were shipping to select customers, and were set to be released for worldwide sale in Q4 2007.

There were rumors that P. A. Semi had a relationship with Apple that suggested Apple would be the premier user of the PWRficient processors. That relationship supposedly ended with the Apple–Intel transition when Apple switched from the Power Architecture to Intel's Core processors for their entire line of computers.