Hittite Microwave took its name from an empire of ancient Anatolia, and its chips worked at frequencies most engineers found hard to tame. Yalcin Ayasli founded the company outside Boston in 1985. For twenty years it designed small, specialized chips that handled microwave and radio signals for cell towers, military radios, satellites and lab instruments. When Hittite went public in July 2005, Ayasli still controlled more than half the votes.

Ayasli's Microwave Workshop

Ayasli founded Hittite in 1985 and served as its chief executive until December 2004, then stayed on as chairman. The company designed integrated circuits, modules and subsystems for radio frequency, microwave and millimeter-wave signals. These chips amplify, mix and switch signals before they reach a device's digital brain. Hittite sold them to equipment makers in telecom, defense, space, test and industrial markets.

Seventeen Dollars to Seventy-Eight

Hittite priced its IPO at $17 a share on July 22, 2005, and listed on the Nasdaq National Market as HITT. It stayed profitable and kept adding product lines as wireless networks and defense systems pushed into higher frequencies. In June 2014 Analog Devices launched a tender offer for Hittite at $78 a share in cash. The deal closed that summer, and Hittite deregistered its shares in August 2014.

Cover: Phaeton Driving the Chariot of Phoebus, Northern Italian. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a chariot in the sky (an ancient empire of chariots).