Atiq Raza’s last stand

This is it for Atiq Raza, the former chief executive of NexGen (sold to AMD in 1996) who also served as Advanced Micro Devices’ president.

As colleague Dean Takahashi reports here, his Cupertino chip start-up Raza Microelectronics has operated in stealth mode as it developed a new type of communications chips. Today, the company has finally emerged: See the company’s main announcement here, and related ones here and here.

There’s a lot of history here…

Raza left AMD in 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble.

He formed a venture capital business, dubbed Raza Foundries, and raised $250 million from companies such as Broadcom, LSI Logic and PMC-Sierra to fund communications-chip start-ups. He hit the jackpot as the chip companies were gobbled up for more than $100 million apiece, sometimes after being in business just a few months.

But:

Then the market dried up, and Raza staged a strategic retreat. He sold off most of Raza Foundries’ start-ups but in 2002 folded two of them into a chip company. He called that company Raza Microelectronics. It acquired network-chip maker Sandcraft in 2003.

Raza recapitalized Raza Microelectronics, bringing in Warburg Pincus as an investor. Benchmark Capital also took a big stake through its investment in Raza Foundries.

More coverage in the WSJ (reg req), which adds that Raza Microelectronics has raised more than $100 million from backers over its lifetime, including from Kodiak Venture Partners and Duff Ackerman Goodrich.