A Kings Langley-based British chip-design company that creates graphics (GPU), AI and processor designs which other companies build into phones, cars and consumer devices.
Imagination Technologies designs the building blocks of chips rather than making chips itself. Its best-known product is PowerVR, a family of graphics processing unit (GPU) designs that other companies license and build into their own chips. A GPU is the part of a device that draws images on a screen. The company says it has worked in the GPU market for more than 25 years. It has also moved into artificial intelligence with a neural network accelerator, a design that helps devices run AI tasks quickly, and it has been investing in CPU designs based on RISC-V, an open standard for processor design. Its technology is used in phones, televisions, cars and other connected devices.
The company began in 1985 as VideoLogic, founded by Tony Maclaren, making graphics, sound and video products for PCs. In 1999 it refocused on licensing designs and took the name Imagination Technologies. Hossein Yassaie led it as chief executive from 1998 to 2016 and later received a knighthood. PowerVR graphics were used in iPhones from 2007 to 2017, and in 2020 the company signed a new multi-year licence with Apple. The company's pages we could read give no formal mission statement, so we have not invented one.
Imagination's head office is in Kings Langley, Hertfordshire. A March 2022 announcement lists a Bristol office and a Cambridge office in central Cambridge, which opened in August 2021 and, the company said, filled within six months. The same announcement named Manchester and Sheffield as places with chip-design talent where it might expand. Apple has opened a chip development office in nearby St Albans, which shows how many chip jobs have grown up around Imagination's home area.
On people and culture, the company says it uses a hybrid working framework that lets staff split their time between company offices and other places. Its chief human resources officer, Nick Merry, said in 2021 that the Cambridge office gave staff in the area "more flexibility than ever" and, in 2022, that the company was looking to expand further. In March 2022 it planned to grow from about 800 to about 1,050 people during that year, though that is an older figure. Glassdoor ranked it 16th among the best places to work in the UK in January 2023, according to Wikipedia. These are claims and rankings from the company and third parties, not something we have checked.
The jobs at a company like this are mainly in engineering. The company's announcements mention teams working on GPU, CPU and AI technology, which means hardware designers, verification engineers (people who test that a chip design works before it is built), software and driver developers, and the human resources and support staff who keep a large engineering company running. If you like maths, computing, physics or electronics, or enjoy puzzles about how things work inside a device, this is a company where those subjects turn into real products you can hold. The company's own site lists current openings.
Website: www.imaginationtech.com
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