The UK arm of a US chip-design company, with its biggest UK site in Edinburgh (the former Wolfson Microelectronics) and a second site in Newbury, designing audio and mixed-signal chips for phones, earbuds and laptops.
Cirrus Logic designs the small chips that sit inside everyday gadgets and handle sound and other real-world signals. Its audio codecs turn the sound from a microphone into digital data and turn digital music back into sound for your headphones or speakers. The company also makes amplifiers, digital signal processors, haptic drivers (the chips behind the buzz you feel on a phone), camera controllers and battery and power chips. Its products go into smartphones, tablets, wireless earbuds, wearables, laptops, AR and VR headsets, home cinema and car entertainment systems. Cirrus Logic is "fabless", which means it designs chips and other companies make them.
The company was founded in 1981 as Patil Systems and was renamed Cirrus Logic in 1984. It has been listed on Nasdaq since 1989 and has its headquarters in Austin, Texas. On its careers pages Cirrus Logic uses the tagline "Powered by Curiosity" and says its work sits "at the edge of precision, innovation and possibility". It also says "Innovation isn't just a value on our wall": it rewards staff who earn patents, runs a programme for documenting valuable know-how and holds an innovation conference every two years where employees present new ideas. Those are the company's own statements. No formal mission statement was found.
The UK story is mostly about Edinburgh. Wolfson Microelectronics was started in Edinburgh in 1984 by David Milne and Jim Reid, both linked to the University of Edinburgh. Its chips ended up in iPods, early iPhones, the Xbox and Sony's PSP, and it joined the FTSE 250 after floating in 2003. Cirrus Logic bought Wolfson in April 2014 and kept the Edinburgh team. Cirrus Logic's careers site lists Edinburgh as a city-centre site with more than 300 people working on chip and software design, and Newbury in Berkshire with more than 70 people working on hardware and software design.
Cirrus Logic's pages say job satisfaction is a key value, and that it wants people to enjoy their work, their colleagues and their location. It mentions wellness classes, charity events, concerts and social events at its UK sites. A graduate digital design job advert for Edinburgh describes a hybrid role with at least two office days a week and a company that stresses inclusion, fairness and community involvement. These are the company's own descriptions, so ask current staff what it is really like.
The roles you can see in the UK are engineering ones: digital and analog chip designers, verification engineers, physical design engineers, systems engineers and software engineers, who work together on a chip from first specification to a tested product. Behind them sit the usual company teams for finance, legal, people and operations. If you like maths, physics, electronics or coding, this is a very direct route to making the technology inside the devices you use every day. Group headcount was reported as 1,625 in 2024, which includes the US sites.
Website: www.cirrus.com
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