SiliconBeat

Caliper Life Sciences extended its lease with Mozart Development for the building at 605 Fairchild in Mountain View, which was set to expire Dec. 1, by five years. In return for the re-commitment, the company will get a reset on its lease rate at 13.6 percent below what its paying now. That means that Caliper’s new rate will take go back to where it was roughly five years before, and then resume rising 3 percent a year from the lower rate over the next five year.

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Richard Beyer quit being chief executive at the Milpitas chip maker Intersil as of last
Sunday. The next day the company and he agreed that he would continue as a consultant for the next month, providing up to 10 hours of advice per week through April 16. In return, the company agreed to let some of his unvested stock option and stock “units”, which would have expired when he quit, continue vesting for an additional month.

To account for the extra vesting, the company will add $685,549 to its compensation expense for the quarter. Breaking that down by the 45 or so hours Beyer might conceivably be”consulting” during that time, his hourly rate comes out to more than $15,000 an hour.

Nice work if you can get it. But very, very few of you can.

John Donovan, Verisign’s executive vice president in charge of product sales and marketing, told the company last week that he is stepping down as of March 31, according to an SEC filing Thursday.

He joined Verisign less than a year and a half ago when it acquired San Diego- based inCode Wireless, where Donovan had been chief executive. He was granted a $5 million payment when inCode was acquired and also received $1.37 million to help him relocate to the Bay Area.

More corporate money well spent.

Synopsys, the Mountain View maker of semiconductor design software, said today it will buy Synplicity of Sunnyvale for $8 a shares, or about $227 million, or $188 million subtracting the cash Synopsys will acquire with the company. The price represented a 50 percent premium to where Synplicity shares closed Thursday before the deal was announced.

Synplicity specializes in tools to help design semiconductors tailored to perform specific function. It made $13.1 million in net profit last year on sales of $71.1 million. Synopsys, netted $130.5 million last year on $1.2 billion of sales. Synplicity’s chief executive, Gary Meyers, will will join Synopsys as a general manager. Its co-founder and chief technical officer, Ken McElvain, will also join Synopsys.

The purchase is the latest in a string of more than two dozen companies Synopsys has bought over the last decade, including former local public companies Avant!,  HPL Technologies, and Nassda.

Are you having problems with the electronic gadgets in your life? Do you find yourself
succumbing to impulsive behavior? Serial relationships that end in frustration? Or are you dazzled into a frozen indecision by all the choices available to you?

Alloy Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners are betting you are, by leading an $8-million, second round of venture financing in Retrevo, a gadget yenta that calls itself “the first matchmaking service for people and electronics that makes finding, buying and using electronics products simple and fun.”

The folks at Retrevo, who got their first funding from these same VCs two years ago, sound rather breathless about their enterprise, calling it a “totally new paradigm for how consumers find, buy and use electronics.”

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In case you can’t go out for coffee this afternoon, here’s something else that might raise your heart rate — a column by one of our favorite reads, Graef Crystal, a columnist for Bloomberg News who writes regularly about executive compensation — the good, bad and the ugly.

Here’s some ugly. In his column today he describes the compensation paid to Jeffrey Mezger, the chief executive of KB Homes, which inarguably had a lousy year. So did the company’s shareholders, whose total return for the fiscal year ended Nov. 30, 2007, was negative 58 percent compared with a positive 7.7 percent return on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

Yet the compensation committee of the KB Board saw fit to give Mezger a $6 million cash bonus, in addition to other goodies. Crystal spells it all out in great detail, but best of all, he draws a comparison with the pay given to the CEO of on of KB’s rivals, Lennar, who received not a penny in bonus last year.

Clearly, not all compensation committees are created equal.

“Former Yahoo Executive Greg Coleman Joins NetSeer as President and Chief Executive Officer” reads the press release put out today by the Los Angeles startup focused on “next generation search and ad targeting.”

Touting Coleman’s Yahoo pedigree struck us as a bit odd, given that the embattled company is in the midst of fending off a takeover offer from Microsoft that came as Yahoo’s profits and stock price sagged.

Coleman, 53, got the heave-ho from Yahoo in August when he was replaced by Hillary Schneider in an ongoing shake-up at the world’s most visited Web site. The press release noted that while Coleman was head of its sales, Yahoo’s revenue grew from $600 million to more than $6 billion. Wow, a 900 percent increase. Pretty nice.

But wait a minute.

Take a look at Yahoo’s principle rival, Google, during that same time: its sales grew from $86 million to $16.6 billion. Let’s see, our Excel spreadsheet says that’s more like an 18,500 percent increase.

Winner or loser? You decide.

Shares of Bell Microproducts will be suspended from trading on the Nasdaq stock market as of Wednesday, March 19. Nasdaq refused to give Bell Micro yet another extension on its deadline for filings its delinquent financial reports with the SEC, according to a filing the company made with the regulatory agency today. Trading in its shares will move to the Pink Pink Sheet Electronic Quotation Service under the ticker symbol BELM.PK.

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Pete Cartwright, the founder and ex-CEO of Calpine, said Tuesday that a new company he has co-founded that employs technology to “produce reliable electricity and less greenhouse gas” has lined up its first round of venture funding from Sequoia Capital, who is leading the round with Bay Partners, with additional money from Redpoint Ventures.

Cartwright, who was fired from Calpine in November 2005 prior to that company’s bankruptcy filing, joined with another ex-Calpine executive Tom Mason to found Advanced Power Projects, a Fremont company that uses technology that captures “waste heat” from combustion gas turbines and turns it into additional power without the need for a steam turbine, condenser or cooling tower,” according the company’s Web site

The level of funding was conspicuously absent from the press release announcing the news and we have yet to hear back from the company as to why.

Other former Calpine executives working at the new company are its former vice chairman, Ann Curtis, who heads HR, and its former VP of operations, Fred Manuel, who is the company’s senior VP of engineering.

John Redding, formerly with General Electric’s nuclear energy division, heads up marketing and sales, while former Orrick, Herrington & Sutclif lawyer Mike Ross is the new company’s chief financial officer and general counsel.

Should they be out this St. Patrick’s evening drinking beer, some Nuvelo employees may have good reason to be crying in it. The San Carlos biotech said in a filing with the SEC it would layoff 22 percent of its workers beginning Thursday because it has decided to discontinue clinical development of its blood-clot dissolver, alfimeprase, after results of its latest trials fell short of expectations.

Nuvelo had 76 employees as of Dec. 31, down by nearly half from the year before. It will
provide severance to the terminated employees and expects to take a $3 million restructuring charge in its current quarter.

Among those losing his job is Michael Levy, executive vice president in charge of research and development. His severance package includes 12 months of salary “”continuation” worth $410,000 last year. He’ll also get 12 months of accelerated vesting of stock options and the
company will pick up the tab for his COBRA medical insurance coverage premiums, worth about $18.969. Last year’s proxy also listed a $225,000 cash bonus among his termination benefits.