And the company has come a long way from its humble beginnings as a small, specialist supplier of ASIC design services in the Nordic region that was founded in Trondheim, Norway in 1983.
The history of Nordic Semiconductor could be described as one of two 20-year-old companies joined together, with the first laying the technical foundations for the second. The original Nordic Semiconductor, named Nordic VLSI, began life as a design house. Nordic VLSI sold consultancy services for mixed signal (analog and digital) application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to individual customers in the Nordics, and later expanded into high performance data converters.
The second Nordic, rebranded to the current identity of Nordic Semiconductor in 2004, began in 2002 with the arrival of Nordic’s current CEO, Svenn-Tore Larsen. It was Larsen who decided that the company would transform from a supplier of services to a supplier of wireless components. It was a keystone decision from which Nordic Semiconductor would never look back.
