The best-selling Wi-Fi chips of 1999 came out of a Florida defense contractor. Harris Corporation's chip unit made the PRISM chip set, which led the market for wireless office and home networks. In August 1999 Harris sold the unit to a new company backed by Citicorp Venture Capital. The buyers revived an old name, Intersil, first used by a chip firm that Jean Hoerni, one of the "traitorous eight" of Silicon Valley, founded in 1967.

Harris Sells Its Chips

Harris had bought the original Intersil in 1988 and folded it into Harris Semiconductor, along with chip units from General Electric and RCA. The 1999 buyout loaded the new Intersil with debt. The plan was to pay it down with an IPO and to grow the fastest parts of the catalog. Those were PRISM wireless chips, analog and mixed-signal parts for communications, and power management chips. Its headquarters stayed on Palm Bay Road in Palm Bay, Florida.

Half a Billion on Day One

Intersil sold 20 million shares at $25 in February 2000, raising $500 million, and listed on Nasdaq as ISIL. Most of the money went to repay buyout debt. The company later sold the PRISM Wi-Fi line to GlobespanVirata in 2003 and built its business around power management and precision analog chips. It moved its base to Milpitas, California. Renesas Electronics bought Intersil for $22.50 a share, about $3.2 billion, closing on February 24, 2017.

Cover: Rainbow over Cascais Bay, Cintra, Portugal, Francis Seymour Haden. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a rainbow over a bay (the PRISM chip).