Last month, Mr. Icahn offered to buy Mentor for $17 a share, less than two weeks after saying the chip-design software company should put itself on the block. Mr. Icahn is known for targeting companies he views as undervalued and seeking changes, such as new management, to boost shareholder value.

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The bid, valued at $17 a share, comes after Mr. Icahn’s $665 million takeover offer for power-generation company Dynegy Inc. expired on Friday. Mr. Icahn is well-known for targeting companies he views as undervalued, seeking changes such as new management to boost shareholder value.
Mr. Icahn and another Mentor investor, Casablanca Capital LLC, have criticized Mentor’s management for hurting shareholders and wasting money. Both Mr. Icahn and Casablanca—run by former Lazard banker Douglas Taylor and by Donald Drapkin, a former official with Lazard and Ronald O. Perelman’s investment firm—also have lambasted the Wilsonville, Ore., company for efforts to move up its annual shareholder meeting and undermine possible efforts to vote on rival board candidates.

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But the company’s origins are interesting indeed. You see, Agnilux was reportedly founded by a group of former Apple (AAPL) employees that includes several from P.A. Semi, the boutique chip design company Apple acquired in 2008. Among them: P.A. Semi founder and CEO Dan Dobberpuhl, former P.A. Semi principal Amarjit Gill, and Mark Hayter, once one of the company’s leading system architects. Already on board at the company: A handful of engineers from Cisco (CSCO) and a software architect from TiVo (TIVO).

Serious talent, but what does Google (GOOG) want with it?

The answer isn’t clear. Unconfirmed reports suggest Agnilux has been working on “some kind of server.” If that’s the case, Google could be thinking of using that server or the design savvy that created it to enhance its own servers, which it designs and builds itself.

That said, Dobberpuhl and company are the folks who presumably led development of Apple’s new A4 chip, which powers the iPad, so it’s possible that Google might have some mobile aspirations here as well. Impossible to say until someone talks. And right now, no one is doing much of that.

Apple (AAPL) won’t say what it is exactly that Drebin’s going to work on, though it’s a safe bet it’s related to the multicore graphics processors in which he has his expertise. After all, Drebin’s the guy that, according to his AMD bio, “led the architecture and design of many of ATI award-winning graphics processors” and “was responsible for the design of the graphics chip used in Nintendo’s GameCube console.” That’s quite a CV and one that suggests he’ll jibe well with the rock-star chip design team Apple brought in-house with its April 2008 acquisition of boutique semiconductor design company, P.A. Semi.

What that team is working on, of course, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps something to power that high-definition, touchscreen e-book reader it’s rumored to be building…

Apple (AAPL) won’t say what it is exactly that Drebin’s going to work on, though it’s a safe bet it’s related to the multicore graphics processors in which he has his expertise. After all, Drebin’s the guy that, according to his AMD bio, “led the architecture and design of many of ATI award-winning graphics processors” and “was responsible for the design of the graphics chip used in Nintendo’s GameCube console.” That’s quite a CV and one that suggests he’ll jibe well with the rock-star chip design team Apple brought in-house with its April 2008 acquisition of boutique semiconductor design company, P.A. Semi.

What that team is working on, of course, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps something to power that high-definition, touchscreen e-book reader it’s rumored to be building…