Imagination Technologies Brand Guidelines: VideoLogic, PowerVR & the Canyon Bridge Years

From PC video cards to licensed graphics.

Imagination Technologies started life in 1985 as VideoLogic, a company founded by Tony Maclaren, who went on to lead it as group chief executive, English Wikipedia says. Its early work was in hardware for personal computers: graphics and sound acceleration, video capture and video-conferencing systems, and home audio. VideoLogic listed on the London Stock Exchange in July 1994.

The technology that would define the company was PowerVR, a graphics architecture. In 1995 VideoLogic signed a licensing agreement over PowerVR with NEC, which took a small stake in the business and gained the rights to manufacture and sell the chip. Wikipedia also records that VideoLogic supplied chips for digital television set-top boxes from the 1990s. The decisive turn came in 1999, when the company refocused on licensing intellectual property in general and renamed itself Imagination Technologies. From then on it would design processor architectures and let other firms build them into their own silicon.

The 2000s brought a run of additions. Imagination bought Ensigma, a digital signal processing specialist, in March 2000 and Cross Products, a maker of development tools, in September 2001. In 2006 Intel took a stake in the company. In November 2008 Imagination announced a licence for a high-performance version of its PowerVR SGX graphics core with a partner it did not name at first; this was later revealed to be Apple, which also bought shares that December. Wikipedia says Imagination’s graphics IP was used in the iPhone from 2007 to 2017.

Further purchases followed: Caustic Graphics, a developer of real-time ray-tracing technology, in December 2010, and MIPS Technologies, the US processor-architecture licensor, agreed in December 2012. By November 2012, Wikipedia says, more than one billion system-on-chip units containing Imagination-developed cores had shipped.

Apple’s notice, a sale and a new owner.

The company’s dependence on one customer became its central problem. On 3 April 2017 Imagination reported that Apple planned to stop using its intellectual property in Apple’s own system-on-chips within two years, and the share price fell sharply, Wikipedia records. The following month Imagination said it would enter a dispute resolution process with Apple and announced plans to sell its MIPS and Ensigma businesses. In May 2017 the design-services firm Sondrel agreed to buy the IMG Works division.

On 22 June 2017 the board put the whole company up for sale. On 25 September 2017 Imagination announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, a private equity firm. Electronic Design reported in September 2017 that Canyon Bridge had raised money from Yitai Capital, whose funding it traced to China Reform Holdings, an investment group linked to the Chinese government; English Wikipedia describes the fund as ultimately owned by the Chinese government. As a condition of the deal, Electronic Design reported, Imagination sold its US-based MIPS business to the American investment firm Tallwood Venture Capital. The takeover was approved in November 2017, ending Imagination’s time as a listed company. Wikipedia notes that security concerns about possible technology transfers followed, and that executives were called before the British parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Relations with Apple were later rebuilt on new terms. On 2 January 2020 Imagination announced a new multi-year licence agreement with Apple covering a wider range of its IP. In November 2020 it sold its Ensigma Wi-Fi operations and IP to Nordic Semiconductor. Imagination also tried a CPU line based on the open RISC-V instruction set, launching its Catapult family in December 2021, but eeNews Europe reported on 7 January 2025 that it had exited standalone CPUs to concentrate on graphics, AI and compute at the edge.

Ownership has been in question since. EDN reported on 6 January 2025, citing Bloomberg, that Canyon Bridge had hired the advisory firm Lazard to look for a buyer. Wikipedia continues to list Canyon Bridge as the owner. In April 2026 the data-centre operator Stellanor announced that it had bought a purpose-built data centre in Hemel Hempstead from Imagination under a sale-and-service-back arrangement, with Imagination continuing to use the facility.

Design and documentation.

Chip-design software and semiconductor IP are hard things to picture. The products are programs, licences and blocks of circuitry that customers place inside their own chips, so the companies that sell them have to borrow images from the work itself. The most common is the chip floor-plan: a die seen from above, its functional blocks lit in bright colour, or the stacked metal routing layers of a layout drawn as glowing lines on a dark ground.

Abstract circuit lines do much of the remaining work. Thin traces, right-angled paths and grids of contact points stand in for a product that no one can hold, and they travel easily from a website banner to a trade-show wall. Alongside them come pictures of people at work: engineers in front of multi-monitor layouts, waveforms and schematics on the screens, the design shown in progress rather than finished.

The trade has its own stages. The Design Automation Conference is where, according to English Wikipedia, Mentor Graphics introduced its first product in 1982, and booths there and at the RISC-V Summit carry the same chip renders, circuit patterns and demonstration screens. Keynote stages follow a familiar pattern too: a chief executive in front of a roadmap slide, with process nodes, product generations and partner names set out across the screen.

This guide looks past those shared images to what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it now, which tools or IP it is known for, and which events in its history — mergers, takeovers, export-control cases — shaped the name it trades under. Where a claim rests only on a company’s own word, we say so.

Graphics IP built into other companies’ silicon.

Imagination is headquartered in Kings Langley, Hertfordshire. The company says it licenses its architecture as soft GPU IP, which its licensees build into their own silicon. It describes PowerVR as “the GPU inside 12Bn+ devices” and says it has spent more than thirty years refining the architecture. Its current graphics range is sold as lettered series, from the A-Series, launched in 2019 according to Wikipedia, to the E-Series, with the company pitching them at mobile devices, consumer electronics, automotive systems and on-device AI. Wikipedia notes that its 2023 IMG DXD design supports DirectX 11 and Vulkan 1.3 and was aimed at cloud gaming, and that other firms, including the Chinese chip designer Innosilicon, have built graphics processors on Imagination architectures.

For a design guide, Imagination Technologies shows how an IP licensor’s name lives mainly inside other companies’ products. Compare Arm, another British processor-architecture licensor, and Nvidia, a graphics company that sells its own chips. For this guide we use a deep teal, mist and amber with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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