UK blocks purchase of Pulsic on security grounds
The UK government has blocked the takeover of EDA software developer Pulsic by a Chinese company.
The purchase of Bristol-based Pulsic by Super Orange of Hong Kong was blocked under the National Security and Investment Act 2021. It is not known how much Super Orange was prepared to pay for the private company.
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A final order was made by Kwasi Kwarteng, the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on the grounds of national security.
This follows the blocking of the sale of a Welsh graphene company and vision IP from the University of Manchester.
The government said that Pulsic’s EDA software for place and route planning and implementation could be used to design leading-edge ICs that could used for military applications.
It also argued that the EDA tools could be used to secretly introduce features or functions into users ICs without their knowledge and that those users could be designing circuits that could be used in defence applications.
Bloomberg reports that the ultimate owner of Super Orange is UniVista, which is aiming to developed EDA tools in China. Bloomberg reports UniVista is led by Pan Jianyue, who headed the China and Asia-Pacific business of Synopsys along with Xu Yun, the former head of Cadence’s Chinese business.
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