It looks like this is the week to acquire your own chip design firm. Following on the heels Apple's purchase of P.A. Semi earlier this week, Sun Microsystems announced yesterday it had completed the acquisition of little-known chip design firm Montalvo Systems of Santa Clara, California. Little information is available about Montalvo as it had been operating in silent mode until earlier this year. The firm's web site simply says "Montalvo Systems is a well funded fabless semiconductor startup funded by prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms." According earlier published reports, Montalvo was working on low-power chips for the X8 market. While Sun offers servers based on AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors, it is probably best-known for it own lineup of SPAR and UltraSPARC RISC-based processors. For this reason it wasn't immediately clear why Sun would be interested in a firm focused primarily on the X86 market. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.