SAN FRANCISCO, July 30 (Reuters) - Shares of chip

designer Ambiq Micro ( AMBQ ) ended their first trading day on

the New York Stock Exchange up more than 60% on Wednesday after

the firm raised $96 million in an initial public offering.

The Austin, Texas-based company, which specializes in

small computing chips that consume very little energy, began

trading at $24 per share and rose as much as 101.8% before

ending the day at $38.53, valuing it at $656.5 million.

Ambiq filed for its initial public offering earlier in

July, with BofA Securities and UBS acting as the lead

underwriters for the offering.

The company has focused on wearable devices such as smart

watches. Sales to Alphabet's Google, Garmin

and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd made up more than 85% of its

revenue in its most recent year.

Ambiq founder and Chief Technology Officer Scott Hanson told

Reuters the company's newest family of chips aims to target

devices such as smart glasses, which run speech and image

recognition algorithms on devices with very small batteries.

"We spent the last 10-plus years figuring out how to build

the lowest power chips, and so we're in a great position

to attack the same problem (on glasses)," Hanson said. "The

transistor doesn't care what problem it's solving, whether it

was some security function we did a couple of years ago or,

today, some AI model."