Integrated Silicon Solution, Inc. (ISSI)

Integrated Silicon Solution, known as ISSI, designed specialty memory chips, including SRAM, DRAM and NOR flash products. Rather than competing in commodity PC memory, it targeted automotive, industrial, networking and medical customers that need long product lifecycles and reliable supply. The company was a fabless designer that relied on foundry partners for manufacturing. It was based in Silicon Valley, with significant operations in Taiwan and China.

ISSI was founded in 1988 and went public on NASDAQ in 1995 under the symbol ISSI. The company rode the boom and bust cycles of the memory market through the late 1990s and 2000s. Over time it repositioned itself toward specialty and automotive markets, which helped steady its margins compared with commodity memory makers.

In 2015 ISSI became the subject of a bidding contest. It first agreed to a buyout by Uphill Investment Co., a consortium of Chinese investors, before Cypress Semiconductor made competing offers. After several rounds of higher bids, Uphill raised its offer to $23.00 per share in cash, and ISSI shareholders approved the deal in June 2015. The transaction also required clearance from the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment.

The merger closed on December 7, 2015, and ISSI became a wholly owned subsidiary of Uphill, with its stock removed from NASDAQ after that day's trading. The deal was one of the notable Chinese acquisitions of a U.S. chip company in that period. ISSI later became part of Beijing-based Ingenic Semiconductor.